As former Wagner Group mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin struggles with his diminished status after being dumped by Russian president Vladimir Putin, repatriated arms trafficker Viktor Bout appears to be on the rise, aiming for his own power base as a far-right Russian political candidate.
Reuters cites a Saturday report from the Russian news agency RIA that Bout was chosen as the candidate of a far-right party for a seat in a Russian regional legislature. RIA quoted an official in Russia’s ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR)’s local organisation as saying that Bout had been nominated to run for the legislative assembly of the Ulyanovsk region in central Russia.
Bout joined the LDPR following his return to Russia. The LDPR holds far-right, ultra-nationalist views and strongly supports President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The LDPR previously provided a home to Andrei Lugovoi, who is wanted in Britain for the 2006 murder of ex-KGB officer and Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko. Lugovoi has served as an LDPR member of Russia’s national parliament since 2007, Reuters reported.
Bout turned up earlier this month with Prigozhin during a tour of a Wagner Group recruitment center in the Russian city of Ulyanovsk. Russian media outlets said Prigozhin described the tour as “a joint trip” and complimented Bout as “the smartest, most educated person.” Prigozhin, whose Wagner Group fighters played a critical role in Russia’s efforts to seize Ukraine’s industrial city of Bakhmut, also published a photo of the pair on Telegram, announcing that they had taken the trip together.
Prigozhin added that “as for the Americans who released (Bout) from prison, of course, they made a big mistake, because he has such a sober attitude towards the existing situation in the Russian Federation that if he reveals his capabilities and implements his plans, then, of course, Russia will become much stronger, firmer, than there is today.”
Ironically, Bout had developed deep ties with autocratic governments in Africa in the mid and late 1990s, two decades before Prigozhin’s Wagner Group made its own inroads over the past several years.
Those halcyon days ended for Bout, a 56-year-old former Soviet military officer, when he was sentenced in 2012 to a 25-year prison sentence following his 2011 conviction on arms trafficking-related charges in federal court in New York. Bout served 10 years of that term in a medium-security jail in Marion, Ill. on charges stemming from his arrest in Bangkok in 2008 after a sting operation launched by U.S. drug enforcement agents.
Bout was finally freed late last year on December 8, traded for Brittney Griner, an Olympic gold medalist and pro basketball star who had been arrested and convicted on narcotics charges in Russia. Bout and Griner were swapped on an airport tarmac in the United Arab Emirates, where Bout had formerly based a fleet of arms transport cargo planes in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
During Bout’s federal trial in New York in 2011, prosecutors described him as one of the world’s most prolific arms dealers, saying he had sold weapons across the globe to terrorists and America’s enemies for decades.
Bout has denied those charges, but has long been known as the “Merchant of Death,” a nickname often used by a British minister. That name is also the title of a book about Bout by investigative reporters Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun that traced the Russian’s arms deals with African dictators and the Taliban in Afghanistan and early efforts by teams in the U.S. and elsewhere across the globe to bring him to justice.