Viktor Bout

Reports say US has proposed to Russia to release convicted arms dealer for Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan.

And this whole story looks to me like a witch hunt.” - Bout is believed to have been born in then-Soviet ruled Dushanbe, Tajikstan, in 1967. I don’t have anything in my life for what I should be afraid of. - He is the subject of the book, Merchant of Death, written by investigative reporters Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun, and is also believed to have been the inspiration for the character played by Nicolas Cage in Lord of War, a Hollywood-produced film released in 2005. - During his time in the military, he was sent to Mozambique and Angola to work as a translator. - According to reports, his father was an auto mechanic, and his mother was a bookkeeper; he also had a brother.

The US made a substantial offer to Russia for WNBA star Brittney Griner. The deal is potentially dangerous, some experts say. But it may be necessary.

“At the same time, we know from past experience the only way to bring people home is through these deals," he said. "Is it fair?" “Yeah, you get her or a couple of people out now,” Saale told USA TODAY recently. And he did just that,” Zachariasiewicz wrote in a recent op-ed for USA TODAY. She also noted Russia is unlikely to accept any deal before Griner's trial ends, which her lawyers predict will occur sometime in August. Griner plead guilty "without intent" earlier this month; the two-time Olympic gold medalist testified Wednesday she accidentally packed vape cartridges filled with cannabis. "No, because fair implies a moral equivalence between these individuals that absolutely does not exist." "We know that such issues are discussed without any such release of information," Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters during a conference call. Any agreement would involve a prisoner swap with Russia or concessions on recent economic sanctions, and CNN reported shortly before Blinken's announcement that the U.S. had offered notorious Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout. It was the first public acknowledgement that the highest levels of diplomatic relations were working to bring the WNBA star home. Others believe previous examples of such exchanges demonstrate it's the only way to safely return wrongly detained prisoners. “Be wary.” Publicizing deals to free Americans sets bad precedent and endangers Americans, some say.

The future of Americans detained in Russia could hinge on the release of Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout. nicknamed the "Merchant of Death."

"I've never touched diamonds in my life and I'm not a diamond guy and I don't want that business." The trial honed in on Bout's role in supplying weapons to FARC, a guerrilla group that waged an insurgency in Colombia until 2016. Bout has repeatedly maintained that he operated legitimate businesses and acted as a mere logistics provider. He said that Bout graduated from the Military Institute on Foreign Languages, a well-known feeder school for Russian military intelligence. Now, at the center of that bid is Bout, a man who eluded international arrest warrants and asset freezes for years. On the same day, Griner testified in Russian court as part of her ongoing trial on drug charges following her February arrest at a Moscow airport.

In the midst of the trial in Russia against Brittney Griner for drug possession, the United States government has acknowledged that they are working with ...

She added that she had no intention of breaking Russian law and was unaware that she entered the European country in possession of marijuana. Africa was a continent particularly hard hit due to the conflicts that arose. Moscow had wanted Bout to be part of a swap for Whelan, the former marine’s Russian lawyer previous stated. Now 55-years old, Bout sourced weapons from the Soviet Union’s stockpiles as was a major player in the global illegal arms trade of the 1990s, able to circumvent international embargoes with Soviet aircraft. The decade long chase to arrest him came to an end in 2008 in a Thailand hotel, when the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency captured Viktor Bout with an undercover operation that had him agree to supply anti-aircraft missiles to undercover DEA operatives. He was generally accepted to be the world’s best-known illegal arms trafficker and has spent the last 14 years in jail, having been extradited to the U.S. on narco-terrorism charges.

There is growing speculation that the Russian arms dealer could be released from U.S. prison in exchange for Russia freeing Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan.

By 2007, the Drug Enforcement Administration devised a plan to lure Bout out of Russia with an arms deal that would be hard to refuse. Bout was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Bout, the son of a bookkeeper and auto mechanic, was conscripted into the Soviet Army when he was 18 years old after playing competitive volleyball as a teenager, according to a New Yorker profile published in 2012. In the U.S, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, unveiled sanctions against Bout and his companies that froze assets and prevented any transactions through American banks. By then, he was on the radar of U.S. and British officials. The agency hired an undercover agent to contact a trusted associate of Bout's about a big business deal. "Sanctions-busters are continuing to perpetuate the conflict in Sierra Leone and Angola, with the result that countless lives are being lost and mutilations are taking place. But I'm still young." "If I didn't do it, someone else would," Bout told the New Yorker. He was extradited to the U.S. in 2010 after two years of legal proceedings and convicted on terrorism charges a year later. The Kremlin said no deal has been made "yet". During a March 2008 meeting in a Bangkok hotel conference room, Bout told the DEA informants posing as FARC officials that he could airdrop the arms in Colombia and acknowledged that the weapons could be used to kill Americans.

Moscow has never forgotten the arms dealer who reportedly keeps a photo of Vladimir Putin in his US cell.

Last year, the Moscow’s civic chamber exhibited 24 of his prison-made artworks, including a number of self-portraits behind bars featuring his signature moustache. Four years later, he was sentenced in a court in New York to 25 years in prison. Others have also questioned the severity of his sentence. When the prosecutor said he had agreed to sell weapons to kill Americans, Bout shouted: “It’s a lie! There, he enjoyed two big advantages that catapulted his career as an arms dealer: access to a large fleet of Soviet-era aircraft and a huge stockpile of surplus weaponry. Much of Bout’s early life, including his place and date of birth, is a mystery.

Bout is a Russian who was the world's most notorious arms dealer in the 1990s and early 2000s. He's serving a 25-year prison sentence in Illinois, ...

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