“Everything is fine,” Viktor Bout, a 55-year-old former arms dealer, told his family on the phone on Thursday after arriving in Russia, according to a short excerpt broadcast on a public television channel. Nicknamed the “merchant of death”, he was released on Thursday during a prisoner exchange in Abu Dhabi involving American basketball star Brittney Griner.
Sentenced in 2012 to twenty-five years in prison, this charismatic mustache had been the subject of negotiations for years between Moscow and Washington. Born, according to a United Nations report, in Dushanbe, capital of the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan, Viktor Bout studied at the Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow, before entering the Air Force.
Cheap weapons
He was able, from 1991 and the fall of the USSR, according to his accusers, to take advantage of the post-Soviet chaos to acquire at low cost a quantity of armaments on military bases delivered to themselves and from officers in search of ways to get rich or simply to subsist.
Another stroke of genius, he built his own fleet of cargo planes to deliver his cargo around the world. The American journalist Douglas Farah, co-author in 2008 of the investigative book “Merchant of Death”, describes Viktor Bout as “a Soviet officer who knew how to seize the opportunity presented by three factors born of the collapse of the Soviet Union: planes abandoned on runways between Moscow and kyiv (…), huge stocks of arms guarded by soldiers that no one paid, and the explosion in demand for arms”.
” Lord of War “
He entered American popular culture in 2005, when the film “Lord of War” was released, inspired by his life, and in which Nicolas Cage plays the arms trafficker Yuri Orlov, chased by Interpol. In Russia, some believe that Washington exaggerates these feats of arms to make a scarecrow and demonize Moscow.
“The myth created about Bout by the United States is indecently primitive: a Russian bad guy was illegally selling weapons and trying to harm America, but the good American guys put an end to it,” writes Russian journalist Alexandre Gassiouk in his book published in 2021 to tell “the real story” of the “Merchant of Death”.
An “honest businessman”
For Viktor Bout’s wife, Alla, her husband is an “honest businessman and a great patriot of his country, condemned for crimes he did not commit”, she wrote in the preface to the book by Alexandre Gassiouk. A former translator and radio operator in the Soviet Air Force, suspected by some of having been a member of the military intelligence services, Viktor Bout was arrested in Thailand in 2008, trapped by American agents.
According to the prosecution, he agreed to sell an arsenal of guns and missiles to these secret agents posing as guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia who said they wanted to use these weapons to shoot down American helicopters helping the Colombian army. In 2010, he will be extradited from Thailand in a jet specially chartered by the United States to stand trial.
A “political” verdict according to Moscow
Found guilty in November 2011 of arms trafficking, he was sentenced in April 2012 in New York to twenty-five years in prison. “I am not guilty, I never intended to kill anyone, I never intended to sell weapons to anyone, God knows the truth”, will launch- he before the verdict was announced.
The Russian Foreign Ministry will then promise to do everything to obtain his return to Russia, describing the verdict as “political”. Moscow has since ceaselessly castigated his incarceration, a sign, for some observers, that Viktor Bout was able to act with the at least tacit consent of Russian officials.