On the same day, Griner testified in a Russian court as part of her ongoing trial on drug charges following her February arrest at a Moscow airport. Whelan was arrested on alleged espionage charges in 2018 and sentenced to 16 years in prison in a trial that US officials called unfair. Their families have urged the White House to secure their release, including through a prisoner exchange if necessary. Now at the center of that bid is Bout, a man who has evaded international arrest warrants and asset freezes for years. The Russian businessman, who speaks six languages, was arrested in a sting operation in 2008 led by US narcotics agents in Thailand posing as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by the acronym FARC. He was finally extradited to the US in 2010 after a protracted legal process. “Victor Bhutt has been the number one enemy of the international arms trade for many years, arming some of the most violent conflicts around the world,” Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said when Bhutt was convicted in New York in 2012 . “He was finally brought to justice in an American court for agreeing to supply a staggering number of military-grade weapons to an avowed terrorist organization committed to killing Americans.” The trial focused on Bout’s role in supplying weapons to the FARC, a guerrilla group that waged an insurgency in Colombia until 2016. The US said the weapons were intended to kill American citizens. But Bout’s history in the arms trade extended much further. He has been accused of amassing a fleet of cargo planes to transport military-grade weapons to conflict zones around the world since the 1990s, fueling bloody conflicts from Liberia to Sierra Leone and Afghanistan. Allegations of human trafficking activities in Liberia prompted US authorities to freeze his US assets in 2004 and block all US transactions. Bout has repeatedly maintained that he was running legitimate businesses and acting as a simple logistics provider. He is believed to be in his 50s, with his age disputed due to different passports and documents. “His early days are a mystery,” Douglas Farah, a senior fellow at the International Center for Strategic and International Studies who wrote a book about Bout, told CNN in 2010. Farah told Mother Jones magazine in 2007 that according to his multiple passports, Bout was born in 1967 in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, the son of an accountant and an auto mechanic. He said Bout graduated from the Military Institute of Foreign Languages, a well-known feeder school for Russian military intelligence. “He was a Soviet officer, probably a lieutenant, who simply saw the opportunities presented by three factors that came with the collapse of the USSR and the government sponsorship that came with it: derelict aircraft on runways from Moscow to Kyiv, no longer able to to fly because of a lack of money for fuel or maintenance, huge warehouses of surplus weapons held by guards who suddenly received little or no pay, and the growing demand for these weapons from traditional Soviet customers and newly emerging armed groups from Africa to the Philippines, “he said Farah in the magazine. Booth said he worked as a soldier in Mozambique. Others said it was actually Angola, where Russia had a large military presence at the time, Farah told CNN. He first became known when the United Nations began investigating him in the early to mid-1990s and the United States became involved. Bout — who is said to have used names such as “Victor Anatoliyevich Bout,” “Victor But,” “Viktor Butt,” “Viktor Bulakin” and “Vadim Markovich Aminov” — is believed to have been the inspiration for the merchant character weapons. played by Nicolas Cage in the 2005 film Lord of War. In 2002, CNN’s Jill Dougherty met with Bout in Moscow. He asked him about charges against him — did he sell weapons to the Taliban? In Al Qaeda? Was he supplying rebels in Africa and getting paid in blood diamonds? — and denied each allegation. “It’s a false claim and it’s a lie,” he said. “I’ve never touched diamonds in my life and I’m not a diamond guy and I don’t want this job.” “I’m not afraid,” he told Dougherty. “I’ve never done anything in my life to be afraid of.” Earlier reporting by Ashley Hayes and CNN staff.
