Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer freed from US custody in December of 2022 and exchanged for WNBA player Brittney Griner, is already back in action back in Mother Russia. There, he’s been chosen as a candidate for a seat in a Russian regional legislature.
The party for which Bout will be running is the nationalist LDPR, or Liberal Democratic Party. It announced that he has been nominated as a candidate for it in the Ulyanovsk region’s legislative assembly. The LDPR currently holds 23 seats in Russia’s national legislature, the Duma, and is to the right of President Putin’s United Russia Party.
Bout’s ties to the LDPR aren’t new. In a Telegram video posted shortly after Bout was released, the LDPR’s leader, Leonid Slutsky, said, “[He is] a courageous man who has become a symbol of a struggle for principles, for spiritual and moral foundations of today’s Russia.”
Bout had been held for 10 years of a 25-year sentence when he was exchanged for Griner in a much-criticized prisoner swap. He had been arrested in Thailand by US agents and accused of arms trafficking, a charge he denied and has continued to deny. He was convicted of four counts: conspiring to kill Americans, acquiring and exporting anti-aircraft missiles, and sending material aid to a terrorist entity.
Bout, called the “Merchant of Death” because of his arms trafficking escapades, is alleged to have sold sophisticated weaponry to both sides in conflicts across the globe. Michael Braun, the former chief of operations for the DEA, told “60 Minutes” in 2010 that “Viktor Bout, in my eyes, is one of the most dangerous men on the face of the Earth.”
Braun also claimed that Bout and his weapons “transformed these young adolescent warriors into insidious, mindless, maniacally driven killing machines that operated with assembly line efficiencies.” Braun then claimed that Bout imported into Africa “AK-47s not by the thousands but by the tens of thousands.”
Speaking about how Bout transported arms around the world, Braun said, “Those Russian aircraft were built like flying dump trucks. He could move this stuff and drop it with pinpoint accuracy to any desert, to any jungle, to any other remote place in the world. Right into the hands of what I refer to as the potpourri of global scum.”
Bout was so successful and integral to the international arms market that the US government contracted two of his companies to deliver supplies to US troops in Iraq. The US then turned on him and arrested him a few years later.
The shift to politics is something a change for Bout, who said when he was freed that he “wholeheartedly” supports Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine and that he would “certainly go as a volunteer” if he had helpful skills and was allowed to go. He also said, when asked if he had a picture of Putin in his prison cell, “Yes, always. Why not? I’m proud that I’m Russian and that our president is Putin.”
Featured image credit: By Drug Enforcement Administration – cropped from http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/MSNBC/Components/Photo/_new/101117_viktor-bout.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17242037
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