In his first interviews with American media organizations, convicted arms trafficker Viktor Bout spoke guardedly about his exchange last December for jailed U.S. basketball star Brittney Griner and his 10-year imprisonment on conspiracy charges which he rejects as an “outrage.”
In an interview with ESPN, Bout talked about his swap last December 8 for Griner on an airport tarmac in Abu Dhabi and about his prison stint in a federal penitentiary in Marion, Ill. — but only in clipped, guarded statements that shed little new light on his time in prison or in his new activities in Russia since he was freed by U.S. prison authorities.
Bout was slightly more expansive in a separate interview and profile in the New York Times, which cited his growing role as a Russian political figure and his blunt admission that his former dominance of the brutal, high-stakes global arms trade is now a vestige of the past.
“Let’s be realistic,” he told Times correspondent Valerie Hopkins in an interview in the Moscow party headquarters of Russia’s nationalist Liberal Democratic Party, which is backing him as a local political candidate. He said he had “nothing much left of my old contacts” in the arms business, especially in Africa, “where regimes are changing quicker than the weather.”
In the ESPN interview, Bout was asked by ESPN writer T. J. Quinn to compare the outrage in the U.S. over Griner’s court conviction in Moscow for possession of vape cartridges to the reaction to Bout’s 2011 trial in a New York federal courtroom that led to his 25-year sentence on arms trafficking-related charges. Bout responded: “Well, think of this, that the same outrage was in Russia when I was sentenced to 25 years. Many people would say, ‘For what? Just for talking? Are you serious?”
A federal jury found Bout guilty of four felony counts, including conspiracy to kill Americans. Bout was extradited to New York from Bangkok, where he was arrested in 2008 by Thai police and DEA agents after a sting operation using U.S. agents posing as Colombian rebels. The agents told Bout they wanted to buy millions of dollars’ worth of weapons, which they said they would use to shoot down U.S. military aircraft.
For more than 20 years, Bout headed an aviation empire using as many as 60 heavy cargo aircraft flying weapons, materiel and other contraband across the Third World, aiding dictators, warlords and militants. His clients included the Taliban, Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi and Liberia’s Charles Taylor, according to US and UN reports, media accounts and “Merchant of Death,” the 2007 profile of Bout and his activities written by Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun.
In the ESPN interview, Bout scoffed at the U.S. charges that landed him in prison for a decade, saying “there is not even a proper translation to Russian of the crime of conspiracy. We don’t have such even the legal term, So, this is this same kind of outrage in Russia about my case and about many other cases.”
Bout said he had followed the coverage of Griner’s arrest before his release but was unaware that he was about to traded for her until the morning in December when Marion prison guards showed up at his cell carrying empty boxes.
There was a knock on his cell door, Bout said and the guards told him: “Hey, you know, wake up and pack up. You’re leaving.” That’s when, Bout said, it dawned on him that “yes, I’m going home.”
Flown to Abu Dhabi, he was exchanged on the tarmac for Griner and flown to Moscow.
There has been speculation in recent days that he might assume some of the African portfolio previously controlled by the mercenary Wagner Group, but Bout told the Times that he first met the group’s deceased leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, only days before Prigozhin led a doomed mutiny against Russian President Vladimir Putin. Prigozhin died last month in a plane crash that Western intelligence officials believe was the result of a deliberately-planned explosion, likely by Prigozhin’s powerful enemies within Russian military circles with Putin’s approval.
Bout joined Prigozhin in June in a visit to a military vehicle factory. Bout told the Times that Prigozhin had been involved in seeking his release from the U.S. prison. But Bout added that he could not elaborate on Progozhin’s role because he was not “fully aware” of his activities.