In February 2022, WNBA star Brittney Griner was detained in Russia after officials found vape cartridges carrying cannabis oil in her luggage.
Griner, who plays for the Phoenix Mercury, is an 8-time All Star, a WNBA champion and an Olympic champion amongst others. A Russian court sentenced Griner to nine years in prison in August, and her appeal was denied Oct. 25.
The 32-year-old was coming into Russia to play for club team UMMC Ekaterinburg, where she has competed in the WNBA offseason since 2014.
As the US government worked to get Griner released and returned to the states, Russia reportedly asked for a prisoner swap. Asking for a man named Viktor Bout, serving a 25-year sentence in the United States for financing terrorism.
So who is Viktor Bout?
Viktor Anatolyevich Bout is a 55-year-old Russian arms dealer who smuggled weapons around the world during the 1990s and early 2000s. He was nicknamed the “Merchant of Death” and “Sanctions Buster” after former British minister Peter Hain read a report to the United Nations in 2003 of his wide-reaching operations, extensive clientele, and willingness to bypass embargoes.
For decades, he became the world’s most notorious arms dealer. He was supplying rogue states and warlords in Africa, Asia and South America. His life served as the inspiration behind Lords of War, a 2005 film which features Nicolas Cage as Yuri Orlov, an arms dealer loosely based on Bout.
In 2007, Stephen Braun and Douglas Farah published a book about Bout: Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible.
Viktor Bout served in the Soviet Armed Forces and graduated from the Russian Military Institute of Foreign Languages. He speaks several languages, including Portuguese, English, French, Arabic, and Farsi (Persian). At the age of 12, he served as a member of the Dushanbe Esperanto club where he reportedly learned the auxiliary language, Esperanto. During a period in Africa, he also learned Xhosa and Zulu.
In the 1990s, Bout traveled to Afghanistan on numerous occasions but has denied dealing with al-Qaeda or the Taliban. According to the CIA, Bout’s planes were transporting small arms and ammunition into Afghanistan.
The agency also added that Bout supplied guns to then-Liberian President and warlord Charles Taylor, now serving a 50-year prison term for murder, rape and terrorism, and to various Congolese factions as well as Philippine Islamist militant group Abu Sayyaf. Bout’s network allegedly delivered surface-to-air missiles to Kenya to be used to attack an Israeli airliner during takeoff in 2002.
In 2008, he was arrested in Bangkok after an elaborate sting operation by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. He was eventually extradited to the US in 2010 after a protracted court proceeding.
“Viktor Bout has been international arms trafficking enemy number one for many years, arming some of the most violent conflicts around the globe,” said Preet Bharara, the US attorney in Manhattan when Bout was sentenced in New York in 2012.
“He was finally brought to justice in an American court for agreeing to provide a staggering number of military-grade weapons to an avowed terrorist organization committed to killing Americans.”
He was charged with terrorism offences that included conspiracy to acquire and use an anti-aircraft missile, conspiracy to provide material support or resources to a designated foreign terrorist organisation, conspiracy to kill US nationals, and conspiracy to kill United States officers or employees.
Bout was convicted in 2012 and sentenced by a court in Manhattan to 25 years in prison, the minimum sentence possible. Russia has been trying to get him back ever since.
