Dubbed the “merchant of death”, the Russian arms-dealer has been swapped for Brittney Griner
, an American basketball star held in a Russian penal colony. Who is he?
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mr Bout spotted an opportunity to sell vast stores of leftover Soviet weapons to dictators and warlords across Africa, Asia and South America. Many had benefited from Soviet patronage during the cold war and now presented a ready market. America paid little notice at first: “a few planeloads of arms going to an African country just didn’t make the cut” as a priority, an official at the State Department told his biographers, Stephen Braun and Douglas Farah.
To ply his trade Mr Bout managed a fleet of roughly 60 cargo planes. That provided cover: he always denied selling guns, and instead claimed to be in the freight-shipping business. “I exclusively deal with air transportation,” he said in 2002, the same year Interpol issued a warrant for his arrest. Indeed he moved non-contraband too, in observance of the freight-industry maxim to “never fly empty”.
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