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The biography of Viktor Bout is full of unknowns, hoaxes, half-truths and data without counteracting, starting with their nationality. The so-called “biggest arms dealer in the world” or directly “the merchant of death”, in the words of the senior official of the United Kingdom Ministry of Foreign Affairs Peter Haiis serving a sentence today in a US prison for trying to sell weapons, some 800 surface-to-air missiles, 5,000 AK-47 assault rifles, C4 explosives and antipersonnel mines, to rebel groups in Colombia.
The Russian businessman was arrested in March 2008 during a covert operation by US agents who met him in Thailand and posed as these guerrillas, considered terrorists by the US. He has defended since then that he is a scapegoat and that he is actually dedicated to the international transport of totally legal merchandise.
Russia has been advocating for his extradition for years.
the ukrainian arsenal
Viktor Bout, believed by some to have been born in the Ukraine and others in Turkmenistan, graduated from the Moscow Military Institute of Foreign Languages in the late 1980s and worked as an interpreter for the UN in Angola in 1991. He is fluent in Russian, Uzbek, English, French, Portuguese and Arabic, in addition to many other languages. After the disintegration of the USSR, he worked as a translator for the Russian Air Force at the Vitebsk military base, where he reached the rank of lieutenant, and enlisted in the Federal Security Service (antiguo KGB).
In the 1990s, he started his arms trafficking business taking advantage of the chaos of the former communist empire and the acquisition of three cargo planes. ‘Antonov AN-12’ for $120,000. As reported Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun in the play ‘The Merchant of Death’, Bout used access to gigantic military transport planes to fly merchandise to countries at war around the world, with a particular predilection for Africa. «[Bout es un] businessman, trader and transporter of arms and minerals who supported the regime of former President Taylor in an attempt to destabilize Sierra Leone and gain illicit access to diamonds,” say the UN reports.
A new generation of traffickers, oblivious to ideological, nationalist or religious limitations, emerged after the Cold War to move through a market that was also global when it came to killing. The main origin of their weapons was located in Eastern Europe, mainly Bulgaria, Moldova and Ukraine. In 1998, Bout took control of the Russian weapons arsenal in the Ukraine and sold it for nearly $50 million. From these bases it supplied weapons for two decades all over the globe. Liberia, Sierra Leone, Angola, Central African Republicthe Congo, Sudan, Libya and several countries in the Middle East have been in its client portfolio.
He was just as capable of selling weapons to one side as to the other in the same war, and he did so on numerous occasions, for example in Angola (to the government and the UNITA rebel guerrilla) or in Afghanistan (to the warlord Massoud and his Taliban enemies). He even negotiated with USA in various operations, including the war in Iraq. «The cooperation between the Pentagon and Bout ended once Washington managed to organize air communication with the military contingent [en Iraq]», says the American Douglas Farah, co-author of the book ‘The merchant of death’.
enemy number one
Parallel to his illegal activity, Bout registered in Belgium airline headquarters Transavia Export Cargo and opened his first flower and food export business. Starting in the 2000s, the facade of an honorable businessman, known as ‘Boris’, ‘Vadim Markovich Aminov’ and ‘Viktor Butt’ (this used by his enemies as a mockery), fell apart and placed him in the target of the secret services of the West. After the attacks of September 11, the position of the obscure businessman became critical due to his business in Afghanistan. In 2002, he had to flee his residence in Belgium after authorities issued an international arrest warrant and US requests to freeze his assets.
Using his different identities, Bout passed through the United Arab Emirates, South Africa and other countries before reappearing in Russia in 2003. In the summer of that year, journalist Peter Landesman put a face to the trafficker after managing to interview him and extract headlines as provocative as that Bout was a vegetarian and an environmentalist. Viktor Bout’s story inspired a book and a Hollywood movie, ‘The Lord of the war’ (2005), starring Nicholas Cage.
The Russian became careless and too dependent on the Kremlin. In the book ‘The Hunt for the Genius of Crime’, Elaine Shannon he writes, quoting the words of another international trafficker, LeRoux, that the Russian had become “vain, sloppy and liked publicity too much. The American cops had even gotten hold of home movies of Bout showing him frolicking naked in the snow, dancing in a karaoke and rubbing elbows with tyrants and murderers.” The belief that Moscow would never allow his downfall led Bout to believe that he was untouchable.
The Putin regime was in those years his great refuge and who continues to demand the return of the prisoner so that he can be tried with guarantees in Russia. «Viktor Bout has been the international arms dealer enemy number one for many years, arming some of the world’s most violent conflicts. The sentence is a fitting end to his career as an arms dealer of the most dangerous order,” said the federal prosecutor. Preet Bharara to support a sentence in the US of 25 years of which he has already served twelve years.
Just before the war in Ukraine, Russia, which considers the process against But “manufactured by the secret services”, negotiated with the US the possibility of reaching “certain commitments” to exchange prisoners. Putin defends that the citizens of his country must serve prison sentences in his territory and has criticized the US on numerous occasions for what he considers extraterritorial use of its legislation.
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