Kremlin media revives push for US release of arms dealer Viktor Bout, the infamous "merchant of death."
Olga Lautman
Over the past week, Russian state media has featured close to a dozen articles on the notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout, who’s currently serving a 25-year sentence in an Illinois federal prison known for holding inmates convicted on terrorism and other serious, related crimes. The Kremlin seems to be signaling a new effort to get him back, with a “hostage exchange” in mind. Its pawns: former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, currently serving a 16-year sentence for espionage and Trevor Reed, another former U.S. marine convicted on charges of resisting arrest after a drunk-driving stop in 2019. When President Biden met with Vladmir Putin in Geneva last June, he raised the cases of Reed, Whelan and Michael Calvey, an American businessman since released after being convicted and handed a suspended sentence on embezzlement charges.
Viktor Bout was arrested in a US sting in Thailand in 2008 (DEA)
If the Kremlin is angling for a swap, it would hardly be the first time Russia and the United States have jockeyed to exchange valuable prisoners, the most famous episode being the swap of U-2 spy plane pilot Gary Francis Powers for Soviet “illegal”agent Rudolph Abel on a German bridge between East and West 60 years ago this past week. It’s said Abel never “broke” under U.S. interrogation.
Bout, 55, a former Soviet military officer and polyglot immortalized as “the merchant of death” in books and movies, was arrested in Thailand in 2008 after U.S. operatives, posing as representatives of FARC, the Colombian revolutionary group, engaged him in a weapons deal. Extradited to New York, Bout was convicted on multiple terrorism-related charges, but given only a minimum 25-year sentence because "there was no evidence that Bout would have committed the crimes for which he was convicted had it not been for the sting operation,” the judge in the case said. Ever since, the Russians have been trying to get him back.
Whelan, meanwhile, has always maintained he was framed as an American spy by a “friend” who turned out to be an FSB agent. "It was really a farce,” he told a BBC reporter in December 2020. “You hear about these things during the Soviet era, when people would then be taken out and shot. It's the same thing."
Calvey, the businessman, said he was arrested because he was suing, and winning, a case against a powerful oligarch. His jailing for a year provoked ourtage from the international business community.
"I view the verdict as unfortunate and deeply unfair," Calvey, 53, told reporters, according the AFP. "Compared to most cases, receiving a suspended sentence is already almost a victory. But on the other hand, it is simply outrageous to be convicted of a crime that never happened."
Retired former CIA officer Christopher Burgess says he always believed that “Whelan's ambush and subsequent 16 years sentence were all designed to get a prisoner exchange for Bout.” The same could be said for Reed, and perhaps Calvey. Asked what made Bout so important, Burgess noted that “Bout successfully smuggled arms for years, a skillset that the Russian special services like to have in their pocket.”
Russian state news outlets began raising the volume on Bout last week, with 11 articles on his case in a two-day flurry alone. The campaign began on RIA Novosti, which featured statements made by Bout’s American lawyer, Steve Zissou, over the possibility of shortening Bout’s 25-year prison sentence. "We continue to build arguments that should be the basis for his release,” Zissou said, “for each of the possible options, such as transfer to Russia under a convention on the transfer of prisoners, an exchange of prisoners, a compassionate release.”
In a separate RIA Novosti piece, Zissou added that if all efforts failed, Bout could still be released four years ahead of schedule, in 2033.
“At this point, it is already quite clear that the U.S. government has no interest in the prisoner exchange. All we hear from the American side is non-stop nonsense about Americans in Russian prisons who are allegedly hostages, while Russians are in American prisons,” Zissou said. He added, "Of course, this will undermine to some extent our efforts” at an early release.
The State Department, deeply engaged on the Ukraine issue, could not be immediately reached for comment about Bout on the weekend.
In yet another piece last week, RIA Novosti trumpeted Zissou’s proposal for the families of Russians and Americans with loved ones in prison to work together on getting them released.
“My opinion is this: it's time for the families of Russians imprisoned in American prisons and Americans serving prison terms in Russia to come together and join forces for the common goal of repatriating their loved ones,” he said.
That was followed by a pair of articles with complaints from Bout’s wife, Alla. In the first piece, she said she hadn’t been able to communicate with her husband for over a week. In the next, she alleged his requests for a doctor to treat a skin infection had been denied.
The two-day publicity frenzy ended with a reminder to Russian readers that Bout’s drawings and paintings are currently on exhibit in Moscow.
Negotiation Item?
Yuri Felshtinsky, a prominent Russian-American historian and political commentator, found the placement of articles in RIA Novosti particularly interesting.
“The news agency’s close relations with top Russian diplomats, politicians, and Kremlin officials is well established,” he said, suggesting that the timing of articles may have to do with the ongoing struggle between Washington and Moscow over Russia’s mass buildup on Ukraine’s border. “The Kremlin might be trying to add a prisoner exchange into the negotiations mix,” he mused, no matter how tiny an issue in the larger scheme of things during the Ukraine crisis. Then again, Kremlin officials raised Bout’s case last year during U.S.-Russian arms negotiations, and Putin renewed his offer to swap prisoners ahead of his video summit with Joe Biden last summer, even as he was beginning to mass troops and military equipment on Ukraine’s border.
“All that signals that Viktor Bout was a highly regarded Russian intelligence operative, possibly working for GRU, during his arms-dealing days,” says Felshtinsky. And the Kremlin also wants it known that it will reward its captured agents for not cooperating with Western interrogators.
“No known businessman that sells weapons can do this without the support and approval of FSB or GRU,” said Felshtinsky, who was a close associate of the late Alexander Litvinenko, an FSB operative who defected to the West in 2000 and was fatally poisoned in London six years later by a Kremlin agent who slipped Polonium-210 into his tea. “His family is in Russia and safe and that suggests that Bout refused to provide information to Americans,” Felshtinsky told SpyTalk.
Global Crime Nexus
But Bout’s ties may go beyond the Russian intelligence services. The Insider, a Russian independent media outlet, obtained a video recording of a 2003 interview Litvinenko gave to freelance Australian journalist Nick Lazaredes, in which he discussed how he met Bout at the infamous Lubyanka prison, during which time Bout disclosed that he was collaborating with retired Maj. Gen. Yevgeny Khokholkov in illegal arms sales to Africa and the Middle East. According to The Insider, Khokholkov was rumored to have close dealings with the infamous Solntsevo organized crime syndicate in Moscow. In post-Soviet Russia that would hardly be unusual: It’s long been known that Russian intelligence, Kremlin officials, oligarchs, and organized crime figures are intertwined and occasionally work together on specific operations, both domestically and abroad.
Litvinenko also claimed to Lazaredes that Bout’s connections didn’t stop with his associates inside Russia. The former FSB agent allegedly confided that he was “told by an employee of the Internal Security Directorate with whom I met: ‘Sasha, you know, they sell tanks. They sell heavy arms to Africa; they go to the Middle East.’” Litvinenko said his suspicions were bolstered when he later saw Bout in Khokholkov’s office.
Bout was also “associated with Ukrainian criminal groups,” Litvinenko claimed, via Andrii Derkach, a Ukrainian businessman and politician and son of a top security official in the notoriously corrupt regime of Leonid Kuchma, the authoritarian president of Ukraine in the 1990s and early 2000s. In 2003, a corruption fighting Russian website implicated both Andrii and Leonid Derkach in illegal weapons transfers to the Balkans, Asia and Africa, including to Islamist terror groups al-Qaeda and al-Shabaab.
In Dec. 2019, Derkach, regarded by U.S. intelligence as a Russian agent, met in Kyiv with President Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani to concoct a corruption case against Joe Biden's son Hunter. In 2020, the Treasury Department sanctioned Derkach for his activities as a Russian agent, including interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Last year, Giuliani’s New York State law license was suspended over false statements about Biden stealing the election. He’s been subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 House committee to testify on election irregularities.
Viktor Bout has allegedly remained loyal and silent for over a decade, in hopes of one day being returned back to Russia through an exchange—and allowed to live. Given his immersion in high level collusion between the intelligence agencies and state sanctioned corruption, it’s no wonder Moscow would want him back. In 2019, Bout’s wife said Moscow had offered to swap as many as 15 imprisoned U.S. citizens for him.
What it would do with him if and when he ever got there, is another question altogether.
Olga Lautman is an analyst and researcher focused on the Kremlin, Eastern Europe, organized crime and intelligence. She is a senior fellow at the Washington, DC-based Center for European Policy Analysis and co-host of the Kremlin File podcast.
If the Kremlin is angling for a swap, it would hardly be the first time Russia and the United States have jockeyed to exchange valuable prisoners, the most famous episode being the swap of U-2 spy plane pilot Gary Francis Powers for Soviet “illegal”agent Rudolph Abel on a German bridge between East and West 60 years ago this past week. It’s said Abel never “broke” under U.S. interrogation.
Bout, 55, a former Soviet military officer and polyglot immortalized as “the merchant of death” in books and movies, was arrested in Thailand in 2008 after U.S. operatives, posing as representatives of FARC, the Colombian revolutionary group, engaged him in a weapons deal. Extradited to New York, Bout was convicted on multiple terrorism-related charges, but given only a minimum 25-year sentence because "there was no evidence that Bout would have committed the crimes for which he was convicted had it not been for the sting operation,” the judge in the case said. Ever since, the Russians have been trying to get him back.
Whelan, meanwhile, has always maintained he was framed as an American spy by a “friend” who turned out to be an FSB agent. "It was really a farce,” he told a BBC reporter in December 2020. “You hear about these things during the Soviet era, when people would then be taken out and shot. It's the same thing."
Calvey, the businessman, said he was arrested because he was suing, and winning, a case against a powerful oligarch. His jailing for a year provoked ourtage from the international business community.
"I view the verdict as unfortunate and deeply unfair," Calvey, 53, told reporters, according the AFP. "Compared to most cases, receiving a suspended sentence is already almost a victory. But on the other hand, it is simply outrageous to be convicted of a crime that never happened."
Retired former CIA officer Christopher Burgess says he always believed that “Whelan's ambush and subsequent 16 years sentence were all designed to get a prisoner exchange for Bout.” The same could be said for Reed, and perhaps Calvey. Asked what made Bout so important, Burgess noted that “Bout successfully smuggled arms for years, a skillset that the Russian special services like to have in their pocket.”
Russian state news outlets began raising the volume on Bout last week, with 11 articles on his case in a two-day flurry alone. The campaign began on RIA Novosti, which featured statements made by Bout’s American lawyer, Steve Zissou, over the possibility of shortening Bout’s 25-year prison sentence. "We continue to build arguments that should be the basis for his release,” Zissou said, “for each of the possible options, such as transfer to Russia under a convention on the transfer of prisoners, an exchange of prisoners, a compassionate release.”
In a separate RIA Novosti piece, Zissou added that if all efforts failed, Bout could still be released four years ahead of schedule, in 2033.
“At this point, it is already quite clear that the U.S. government has no interest in the prisoner exchange. All we hear from the American side is non-stop nonsense about Americans in Russian prisons who are allegedly hostages, while Russians are in American prisons,” Zissou said. He added, "Of course, this will undermine to some extent our efforts” at an early release.
The State Department, deeply engaged on the Ukraine issue, could not be immediately reached for comment about Bout on the weekend.
In yet another piece last week, RIA Novosti trumpeted Zissou’s proposal for the families of Russians and Americans with loved ones in prison to work together on getting them released.
“My opinion is this: it's time for the families of Russians imprisoned in American prisons and Americans serving prison terms in Russia to come together and join forces for the common goal of repatriating their loved ones,” he said.
That was followed by a pair of articles with complaints from Bout’s wife, Alla. In the first piece, she said she hadn’t been able to communicate with her husband for over a week. In the next, she alleged his requests for a doctor to treat a skin infection had been denied.
The two-day publicity frenzy ended with a reminder to Russian readers that Bout’s drawings and paintings are currently on exhibit in Moscow.
Negotiation Item?
Yuri Felshtinsky, a prominent Russian-American historian and political commentator, found the placement of articles in RIA Novosti particularly interesting.
“The news agency’s close relations with top Russian diplomats, politicians, and Kremlin officials is well established,” he said, suggesting that the timing of articles may have to do with the ongoing struggle between Washington and Moscow over Russia’s mass buildup on Ukraine’s border. “The Kremlin might be trying to add a prisoner exchange into the negotiations mix,” he mused, no matter how tiny an issue in the larger scheme of things during the Ukraine crisis. Then again, Kremlin officials raised Bout’s case last year during U.S.-Russian arms negotiations, and Putin renewed his offer to swap prisoners ahead of his video summit with Joe Biden last summer, even as he was beginning to mass troops and military equipment on Ukraine’s border.
“All that signals that Viktor Bout was a highly regarded Russian intelligence operative, possibly working for GRU, during his arms-dealing days,” says Felshtinsky. And the Kremlin also wants it known that it will reward its captured agents for not cooperating with Western interrogators.
“No known businessman that sells weapons can do this without the support and approval of FSB or GRU,” said Felshtinsky, who was a close associate of the late Alexander Litvinenko, an FSB operative who defected to the West in 2000 and was fatally poisoned in London six years later by a Kremlin agent who slipped Polonium-210 into his tea. “His family is in Russia and safe and that suggests that Bout refused to provide information to Americans,” Felshtinsky told SpyTalk.
Global Crime Nexus
But Bout’s ties may go beyond the Russian intelligence services. The Insider, a Russian independent media outlet, obtained a video recording of a 2003 interview Litvinenko gave to freelance Australian journalist Nick Lazaredes, in which he discussed how he met Bout at the infamous Lubyanka prison, during which time Bout disclosed that he was collaborating with retired Maj. Gen. Yevgeny Khokholkov in illegal arms sales to Africa and the Middle East. According to The Insider, Khokholkov was rumored to have close dealings with the infamous Solntsevo organized crime syndicate in Moscow. In post-Soviet Russia that would hardly be unusual: It’s long been known that Russian intelligence, Kremlin officials, oligarchs, and organized crime figures are intertwined and occasionally work together on specific operations, both domestically and abroad.
Litvinenko also claimed to Lazaredes that Bout’s connections didn’t stop with his associates inside Russia. The former FSB agent allegedly confided that he was “told by an employee of the Internal Security Directorate with whom I met: ‘Sasha, you know, they sell tanks. They sell heavy arms to Africa; they go to the Middle East.’” Litvinenko said his suspicions were bolstered when he later saw Bout in Khokholkov’s office.
Bout was also “associated with Ukrainian criminal groups,” Litvinenko claimed, via Andrii Derkach, a Ukrainian businessman and politician and son of a top security official in the notoriously corrupt regime of Leonid Kuchma, the authoritarian president of Ukraine in the 1990s and early 2000s. In 2003, a corruption fighting Russian website implicated both Andrii and Leonid Derkach in illegal weapons transfers to the Balkans, Asia and Africa, including to Islamist terror groups al-Qaeda and al-Shabaab.
In Dec. 2019, Derkach, regarded by U.S. intelligence as a Russian agent, met in Kyiv with President Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani to concoct a corruption case against Joe Biden's son Hunter. In 2020, the Treasury Department sanctioned Derkach for his activities as a Russian agent, including interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Last year, Giuliani’s New York State law license was suspended over false statements about Biden stealing the election. He’s been subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 House committee to testify on election irregularities.
Viktor Bout has allegedly remained loyal and silent for over a decade, in hopes of one day being returned back to Russia through an exchange—and allowed to live. Given his immersion in high level collusion between the intelligence agencies and state sanctioned corruption, it’s no wonder Moscow would want him back. In 2019, Bout’s wife said Moscow had offered to swap as many as 15 imprisoned U.S. citizens for him.
What it would do with him if and when he ever got there, is another question altogether.
Olga Lautman is an analyst and researcher focused on the Kremlin, Eastern Europe, organized crime and intelligence. She is a senior fellow at the Washington, DC-based Center for European Policy Analysis and co-host of the Kremlin File podcast.
SpyTalk editor Jeff Stein contributed to this story.
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