UPDATE: Brittney Griner Traded for the Merchant of Death
Russia trades for the man who kept the secrets
The United States today traded Viktor Bout, one of the world’s most notorious weapons dealers, to the Russians for the American women’s basketball star Brittney Griner. Asia Sentinel wrote about the possibility of this trade on August 1.Â
On March 6, 2008, agents of the US Drug Enforcement Agency, backed by the Royal Thai police, forced open the door of a five-star Bangkok hotel room to capture one of the most prolific and elusive weapons peddlers in the world at the time. He was Viktor Bout, then 41, a former member of the collapsed Russian air force and known by a plethora of nicknames including the Lord of War.
Bout has been largely forgotten by the world, moldering in a US prison since 2011. But it appears he has not been forgotten by the Kremlin. And the bargaining that is going on to trade him for the US Women’s National Basketball League star Brittney Griner, who has been sentenced to five to 10 years in a Russian prison for entering the country with two vials of hashish oil for pain relief – a minor offense elsewhere – demonstrates the asymmetry of Russia’s strategy to recover valuable people captured by western powers, critics say: arrest minor offenders, hold them until opposing forces are willing to pay to get them back.
It is uncertain if the Russians jailed the 205 cm-tall Griner, one of America’s brightest female athletes, in order to get Bout back. But in Griner, they have a real prize, along with a couple of other run-of-the-mill Americans. That Bout’s name has surfaced 15 years after he was arrested for trying to sell a planeload of weapons to FARC guerrillas in Colombia in what turned out to be a DEA sting makes it likely.
Who exactly is – or was – Viktor Bout?…