Russia on Thursday freed US-arrested arms dealer Victor Bott Prisoner exchange With American basketball player Brittney Griner at Abu Dhabi Airport in the United Arab Emirates.
Dubbed the “merchant of death” and “barrier-buster” for his ability to evade arms embargoes, Bode, 55, was one of the world’s most wanted men before his arrest in 2008 on multiple drug-trafficking charges.
For nearly two decades, Bode became the world’s most notorious arms dealer, selling weapons to rogue states, rebel groups and warlords in Africa, Asia and South America.
His life inspired a 2005 Hollywood film. Lord of WarNicolas Cage plays Yuri Orlov, an arms dealer.
The origin of the bot is still shrouded in mystery. Biographies generally agree that he was born in 1967 in Dushanbe, the capital of Soviet Tajikistan, near the Afghan border.
An accomplished linguist using his mastery of English, French, Portuguese, Arabic, and Persian, Bode attended the Dushanbe Esperanto Club as a youth, becoming fluent in the language created by Ludwig Lejser Zamenhof in the late 19th century.
A stint in the Soviet Army followed, where Bode reportedly attained the rank of lieutenant, serving as a military interpreter in Angola, which later became the focus of his business.
After the collapse of the Communist bloc between 1989 and 1991, Bot’s business flourished when he profited from a sudden bounty of discarded Soviet-era weapons to fuel a series of fraternal civil wars in Africa and Asia.
With the Soviet Union’s vast air force completely disintegrated, Bode was able to acquire a squadron of about 60 ex-Soviet military aircraft stationed in the United Arab Emirates, with which he began distributing his products around the world.
A 2007 autobiography titled The Merchant of Death: The Man Who Makes Guns, Airplanes, and War Possible (Merchant of Death: Guns, Airplanes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible), by Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun, relates various details of Bot’s obscure trade. Reuters could not independently verify the allegations.
From a base in the emirate of Sharjah, Boute intertwines his arms-dealing empire with a benign logistics business, always insisting, when asked, that he is a legitimate businessman with respectable clients.
Even so, Bout was one of the world’s most wanted men at the turn of the millennium, having first appeared on the CIA’s radar when reports began circulating that an obscure Russian citizen was dealing arms in Africa.
Business over politics
With a client agenda that spans rebel groups and militias from the Congo to Angola and Liberia, Bout espouses no ideology, always putting business above politics.
In Afghanistan, according to a biography by Douglas Farah and Stephen Brown, he sold many weapons to the Taliban and their Northern Alliance enemies.
According to the book, Bout supplied weapons to then-Liberian president and warlord Charles Taylor, who is now serving a 50-year sentence for murder, rape and terrorism, and to various Congolese factions and the Philippine Islamist group Abu Sayyaf.
Victor Bott ended in 2008, when an elaborate DEA sting operation tracked the arms dealer to a luxury hotel in Bangkok.
During a spectacular police operation, he was caught red-handed negotiating the sale of 100 surface-to-air missiles to cover American agents posing as representatives of the Colombian FARC guerrilla group.
After more than two years of diplomatic wrangling, in which Russia insisted that Bout was innocent and that his case was political, Bout was extradited to the United States, where he faces various charges, including conspiracy to support terrorists and conspiracy to kill American citizens. and money laundering.
Bode was tried on FARC-related charges, which he always denied, and in 2012 he was convicted and sentenced by a Manhattan court to 25 years in prison, the minimum sentence. Since then, the Russian government has never stopped trying to recover it, which happened Thursday with the exchange for Brittney Griner.
“Russian Federation He worked hard to save our countryman. The Russian citizen has returned to his homeland,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
To some experts, in addition to his connections in the international arms trade, the Russian government’s continued interest in Bot’s recovery suggests the hijacker has ties to Russia’s secret services.
In interviews, Bout said he attended the Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow, which serves as a training camp for military intelligence officers.
“Bot is definitely a GRU agent [os serviços secretos militares da Federação Russa]Or at least a GRU asset,” Mark Galliotti, an expert on Russian security services at the Royal United Services Institute think-tank, told Reuters.
“His case has become a priority for the Russian secret services, thus showing that they have not abandoned their own”, Galliotti adds.
According to Christopher Miller, a journalist who corresponded with neo-Nazis incarcerated with Bout at the US prison in Marion, Illinois, the former arms dealer kept a photo of Russian President Vladimir Putin in his cell and said he did not believe Ukraine should exist. As an independent country.
“Hardcore explorer. Extreme communicator. Professional writer. General music practitioner. Prone to fits of apathy.”