Who is ‘Merchant Of Death’ Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer exchanged for US basketball star Brittney Griner?

Viktor Bout, a convicted arms dealer nicknamed "Merchant of Death," has been released by the US in a one-for-one prisoner swap that freed women's basketball star Brittney Griner, who had been imprisoned in Russia since February.

Earlier reports suggested a possible swap for Griner and US Marine veteran Paul Whelan, who was sentenced to 16 years in a Russian prison on espionage charges he called a set-up and which the US government dismissed as false. However, the final agreement was only for Griner.

Prior to his arrest in 2008 on multiple charges related to arms trafficking, Bout, 55, was one of the world's most wanted men. He was dubbed "the merchant of death" and "the sanctions buster" for his ability to get around arms embargoes. Bout was selling weapons to rogue states, rebel groups and murderous warlords in Africa, Asia and South America.


Even so, Bout's origins remained a mystery. Biographies generally agree that he was born in 1967 in Dushanbe, Soviet Tajikistan's capital at the time.

Bout reportedly attended the Dushanbe Esperanto as a young boy. Later, he used his alleged command over English, French, Portuguese, Arabic and Persian to expand his international arms empire. Bout then joined the Soviet army, rising to the rank of lieutenant and working as a military translator, including in Angola, which would later become central to his business.

Bout's big break came in the days following the Communist bloc's collapse in 1989-91, when he capitalised on a sudden glut of discarded Soviet-era weaponry to fuel a series of fratricidal civil wars in Africa, Asia and beyond. With the Soviet Union's vast air fleet disintegrating, Bout was able to acquire a squadron of approximately 60 old Soviet military aircraft based in the United Arab Emirates, allowing him to supply his products all over the world.

Several details of Bout's murky trade were reported in the 2007 biography "Merchant of Death: Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible" by Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun. He interwove his arms trafficking empire with a seemingly innocuous logistics business from a base in the Gulf emirate of Sharjah.

Bout, who first came to the CIA's attention amid reports of a shadowy Russian citizen trading arms in Africa, was one of the world's most wanted men by the millennium's turn.

It was claimed that Bout supplied weapons to then-Liberian President and warlord Charles Taylor, who is currently serving a 50-year prison sentence for murder, rape and terrorism, as well as various Congolese factions and the Philippine Islamist militant group Abu Sayyaf. The end came only in 2008 when Bout was tracked across multiple countries to a luxury hotel in Bangkok by the US Drug Enforcement Administration.


During a spectacular sting operation, Bout was caught on camera agreeing to sell 100 surface-to-air missiles to undercover US agents posing as representatives of Colombia's leftist FARC guerrillas, who would use them to kill US troops. Thai police apprehended him shortly after. After more than two years of diplomatic wrangling in which Russia insisted loudly that Bout was innocent and his case was politically charged, he was extradited to the United States, where he faced a slew of charges, including conspiracy to support terrorists, conspiracy to kill Americans, and money laundering.

Bout was tried on FARC-related charges, which he denied, and was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison by a Manhattan court in 2012, the minimum sentence possible. Since then, the Russian government has been eager to reclaim him.

FAQs:

1. Who is the Merchant of Death?
   Merchants of death was a term coined in the 1930s in the United States to describe industries and banks that supplied and funded World War I.
2. What exactly did Viktor Bout do?
   Bout, a former Soviet military officer charged with conspiring to kill Americans, acquiring and exporting anti-aircraft missiles, and providing material support to a terrorist organisation.