Russia wants Viktor Bout back, badly. The question is: Why?
According to press reports, the U.Due south. government is prepared to swap notorious Russian artillery dealer Viktor Bout for Paul Whelan and Brittney Griner, two Americans currently jailed in Russian federation.
Whelan, a onetime U.S. Marine and Michigan police officer, was arrested in Russia in December 2018 on espionage charges, which he denied; he was sentenced to 16 years in June 2020. Griner, a WNBA thespian and Olympic gold medalist, was detained in Feb at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Aerodrome, exactly one week before Russia'southward invasion of Ukraine, on charges that she was trafficking cannabis oil — a banned substance in Russia — inside vape canisters. She pleaded guilty on July 7 and now faces upwardly to x years in prison.
Few U.Due south. officials take the Russian prosecutors' allegations at confront value; the prevailing view is that both Whelan and Griner were snatched every bit hostages for exactly the kind of bandy at present under consideration, or as bargaining chips for lifting U.South. sanctions on Russian federation. "The Russian security services watched Griner closely and knew they could compromise her," a erstwhile U.S. intelligence officer told Yahoo News. "She's a Black gay woman who could be portrayed as carrying drugs, and they waited until she departed. This was non legitimate police enforcement but cynical power games by the Kremlin." John Sipher, the former deputy head of "Russia House" at the CIA, said Whelan would have been unlikely to be recruited past any U.Southward. intelligence service owing to his compromised history: He was given a bad-conduct discharge from the Marine Corps after existence court-martialed on larceny-related offenses in 2008.
Even past the Kremlin'due south suspect characterization of Whelan and Griner, the allegations against Tour are far worse.
"In the tardily 1990s," Jonathan Winer, a senior official in the State Department during the Clinton administration who tracked Bout's movements, told Yahoo News, "Bout was the No. two target for the United States, after Osama bin Laden." In fact, the infamous arms dealer, widely known as the "merchant of expiry," has even been accused of arming al-Qaida.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union until his capture in a 2008 Drug Enforcement Administration sting functioning in Bangkok, Tour supplied a rogue'due south gallery of governments and militias with guns, armament and aircraft. Nicolas Cage played a thinly veiled version of him in the 2005 film "Lord of War," although the real-life version's antics were more than cinematically uncanny. Even Bout's aliases — "Viktor Budd," "Viktor Butt" and, simply, "Boris" —might have stretched credulity for a Bond villain.
Bout was chummy with a succession of African dictators, including Libya's Moammar Gadhafi, Rwanda'south Paul Kagame, Zaire'south Mobutu Sese Seko and Liberia's Charles Taylor, the latter of whom paid him in conflict diamonds and whose child soldiers operated the antique Antonov cargo planes that Bout sold him. Warlord Sam "Mosquito" Bockarie committed crimes against humanity in Sierra Leone with Tour-proffered weapons. Some of these clients would object to Bout'south apparent racism and peremptory behavior: a pushy Russian in the midst of anticolonial (or postcolonial) leaders. Just that hardly affected his bottom line or their willingness to enrich it.
The Tajikistan-born weapons merchant could play both sides of any state of war to his advantage. He equipped the Taliban with an air strength before nine/11 and also sent weapons to their mortal enemy, Ahmad Shah Massoud, the commander of the Northern Alliance and old Afghan defense government minister, with whom he liked to chase the finely horned Marco Polo sheep of the Pamir Mountains. Both the Taliban and Massoud evidently knew their banker was double-dealing, but they put upwardly with it because they had no choice, every bit ane Bout associate later recounted to his biographers: "No ane else would deliver the packages."
Astonishingly, even subsequently beingness hunted by the U.S. government for years, Bout's flagship company Irbis ("snow leopard" in Russian) even secretly acted as a private airlift courier for supplies intended for the U.Southward. armed forces and contractors in occupied Iraq in 2004.
For all Tour'south blood-boltered infamy, some erstwhile national security officials think the Biden administration fabricated the correct call. "Information technology's a trade that has to be fabricated, despite all the pitfalls," according to Marc Polymeropoulos, who oversaw the CIA's secret operations in Europe and Eurasia. "The pressure from the families on the White House is immense." Polymeropoulos acknowledged that the merchandise would amount to "rewarding terrible Russian beliefs" — equating a notorious international arms trafficker with Whelan and Griner — simply that the cost would be worth it. "Make no error, the Americans have no hope of release salve for this swap. Also, let's not forget that the Israelis have for decades swapped Palestinian terrorists for their imprisoned soldiers, and sometimes merely their remains."
Sipher agrees. "Kickoff, it'due south a hard policy call, and I'm glad that Americans that were wrongly held as hostages volition be freed. I understand why an American president makes such a deal. Yet, we should admit that we played Vladimir Putin's game. He got what he wanted in his typical bullying manner. He knows he tin can push the W around and will do it until he is stopped."
The U.S. sanctioned Tour in 2004 due to his gunrunning to Liberia; a yr after, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned iv of his associates and 30 of his companies.
Co-ordinate to the 2008 sealed indictment against Bout, filed in the Southern District of New York, he agreed to provide avant-garde weapons systems to FARC, the Colombian terrorist organization, knowing that they would be used to target Americans and U.S. military personnel.
The Russian "assembled a fleet of cargo airplanes capable of transporting weapons and military equipment to various parts of the world, including Africa, S America and the Middle East," the indictment read. Everything from AK-47s to attack helicopters wound up in the holds of Bout'due south cargo planes, of which in that location were scores, under unlike national flaggings. He maintained the largest private fleet of post-Soviet cargo shipping in the world at ane signal, administering it nether a veneer of legitimacy past transporting nutrient, medicine and other licit goods along with lethal contraband.
Bout was found guilty in 2011 on all iv counts of the indictment: conspiracy to impale U.Due south. nationals, conspiracy to kill officers and employees of the U.South., conspiracy to learn and use antiaircraft missiles, and conspiracy to provide fabric support or resources to a terrorist arrangement. He is now in the 10th yr of a 25-yr sentence.
Peter Hain, the former minister of state for Africa at the British Foreign Part, told the London Sunday Telegraph in 2002 that Bout was "supplying the Taliban and al-Qaida," an allegation that Bout always denied, portraying himself equally an honest businessman toting innocent wares such every bit textiles and article of furniture to places similar Afghanistan. (It was Hain who coined Bout's unshakable moniker, the "merchant of decease.")
Bout has for years also loudly denied any connection to the Russian authorities or its military intelligence service, nonetheless known by its Soviet-era acronym, the GRU.
However, in "Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Human being Who Makes War Possibile," a 2007 chronicle of Bout's malign activities, authors Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun quote one of his associates: "The GRU gave him iii airplanes to starting time the business. The planes, countless numbers of them, were sitting there doing nothing. They decided, let'south make this commercial. They gave Viktor the aircraft and in exchange nerveless a part of the charter coin. Information technology was a setup from the beginning." An unnamed analyst who worked with British intelligence also told the authors that MI6, the U.K.'s foreign intelligence service, "never had whatsoever dubiousness Bout was GRU cloth."
U.N. officials placed Bout's earlier career equally that of an interpreter for Russian peacekeepers in Angola; he had trained at the Soviet Military Found of Foreign Languages in Moscow, a favored stalking ground for GRU recruitment. War machine translators are often GRU officers stationed under diplomatic embrace attributable to the spy service's polyglot task requirement. Bout has said he speaks six languages. His bodyguards in his heyday were as well reportedly all veterans from GRU Spetsnaz, or special forces.
Russia'southward armed forces intelligence bureau has come up nether international scrutiny in the last several years, specially after U.Southward. special counsel Robert Mueller concluded that a team of now-indicted GRU officers in Moscow were responsible for the hack-and-leak operation against the Democratic Political party email servers in 2016, with the limited intent of influencing the issue of that yr'southward presidential contest.
GRU operatives have been busy outside the digital domain also.
Operatives attached to an elite assassination-and-sabotage cell known as Unit 29155 were sent to Salisbury, England, in 2018 to poison a GRU defector, Sergei Skripal, along with his daughter, Yulia, with a Russian-manufactured nerve agent.
Unit 29155 has also lately been linked to a string of earlier mysterious poisonings over the last decade, including that of another arms dealer, the Bulgarian Emilian Gebrev, who succumbed to Skripal-like symptoms in 2015 along with his son and his factory manager virtually his office in primal Sofia. A series of explosions of factories and depots elsewhere in Republic of bulgaria and also the Czech Republic, both of them NATO and European union member states, have been attributed to Unit 29155 operatives, leading to expulsions of Russian intelligence officers from embassies in both countries. Tellingly, these sites are believed to take contained Soviet-era ammunition bound for Ukraine.
Given the unprecedented access Bout had to surplus weapons and ammunition stocks, not to mention the enormous Antonov freighters scattered like metal carcasses beyond airfields of the fallen Soviet empire, it beggars belief that he was not in some style linked to Russian intelligence.
That would certainly account for why Vladimir Putin's regime has so desperately sought for his repatriation to Russia and why the U.S. side evidently believes Bout would exist a tempting trade amid caustic tensions between the two countries. The Kremlin, said Winer, the former State Department official, "moved sky and earth" to offset prevent Bout's extradition to the U.S. from Thailand and and so to secure his release from prison house. The Russian Foreign Ministry has classed him equally a political prisoner and, for more than than a decade after his capture, serially raised his release with Washington in some kind of exchange. "The big question was whether he was basically state-sponsored or a rogue operator whom the Russian government found useful," Winer told Yahoo News. "Was he an amanuensis of the GRU when we defenseless him?"
Given Tour'due south conviction in a U.South. court for aiding and abetting FARC, it's a slightly awkward question for the Biden administration, at present facing a mounting chorus to label Russia itself a country sponsor of terrorism. On Thursday, the Senate unanimously adopted a nonbinding resolution urging Secretarial assistant of State Antony Blinken to designate Moscow as such.
The text of the resolution non only cites Russian military atrocities confronting civilians in Chechnya, Georgia, Syria and Ukraine merely also names the Wagner Group, a notorious mercenary outfit. Financed by the U.Southward.- and EU-sanctioned oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin — a catering magnate and architect of the St. Petersburg "troll farm" implicated by Mueller in the 2016 U.Southward. ballot interference scheme — the Wagner Group has committed "serious human rights abuses in Ukraine, Syria, Libya, the Central African Democracy, Sudan and Mozambique," according to the European Marriage. The allegations include torture and extrajudicial killings. The Senate also accuses the group of having tried to electrocute Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the start of Russia'southward invasion in Feb.
The Treasury Department sanctioned the Wagner Group as a "Russian Ministry of Defence force proxy force." The mercenaries maintain a army camp in the Russian region of Krasnodar, right next door to a well-guarded training facility for GRU Spetsnaz, of whichWagner's leader, Dmitry Utkin, was once a brigade commander. Co-ordinate to Polymeropoulos, the former CIA officeholder, "there was never any doubt that Wagner functions as an arm of the GRU."
Might the aforementioned be said of the human being now sitting in a medium-security penitentiary in Marion, Ill., awaiting his plane back to Moscow?
"They will try to lock me up for life," the then-45-twelvemonth-old Tour told the New Yorker earlier his sentencing. "But I'll get back to Russia. I don't know when. But I'chiliad still immature. Your empire will collapse and I'll go out of here."
Source: https://news.yahoo.com/who-is-viktor-bout-infamous-arms-dealer-may-be-in-a-russian-prisoner-swap-for-brittney-griner-paul-whelan-185036462.html
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