Triumphant return to Russia for Viktor Bout, the arms trafficker exchanged for American basketball player Brittney Griner, Thursday, December 8, on the tarmac of Abu Dhabi airport in the United Arab Emirates. Immediately after the exchange, Russian television channels showed him on board a private jet leaving for Moscow, having his blood pressure checked, phoning his family. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed his release after eleven years spent in the United States where he was serving a twenty-five-year prison sentence for arms trafficking and support for terrorism.
The 55-year-old former soldier, known abroad as the “merchant of death”, who fueled the bloodiest conflicts in the Middle East and Africa, is described at home as a patriot unjustly imprisoned by a viscerally anti-Russian administration. The fact of having teamed up with the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, the former Liberian President Charles Taylor, who is serving fifty years in prison in the United Kingdom for crimes against humanity and war crimes, the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi , is not disqualifying in Russia, on the contrary. The media describe him as a sophisticated tradesman, vegetarian, painter in his spare time. His paintings have also been exhibited recently by the Council of the Federation, the Upper House of Parliament. The Lower House, the Duma, has invited him to deliver a speech shortly.
His rise is as dazzling as it is mysterious. A translator for the Soviet army in Angola and Mozambique in the late 1980s, Lieutenant Bout chose to go into business when the USSR collapsed in 1991. In Russia at the time, many military pilots are out of work, planes are grounded and the defense industry has inventory to spare. In a few years, this obscure military interpreter will create the most extensive network of arms deliveries to civil wars and dictatorships, especially in Africa, easily playing around with UN sanctions. His empire – $6 billion in 2008, according to the Associated Press – is an impossible web of opaque companies to unravel. Above all, no one knows with what funds he launched his business.
Not looking at customers
In 1992, aged 25, he bought two Antonovs from the ex-Soviet army. Officially, to transport flowers, furniture, frozen chickens. Air traffic is organized from South Africa, then from the United Arab Emirates. The success is immediate. Four years later, the company has 160 aircraft and a thousand employees. Viktor Bout is not looking at the clientele. In 1995, the cargo – 30 tons of weapons – that he had chartered by plane for the Afghan leader Burhanuddin Rabbani fell into the hands of the Taliban, his enemies. During the negotiations for the release of the crew, he takes the opportunity to sell them his services.
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