Former Soviet air force pilot Viktor Bout, who was swapped for US basketball star Brittney Griner today, fuelled some of the world's bloodiest conflicts by trafficking weapons across several continents
In a career spanning two decades, and which stopped when he was sentenced to 25 years in a US prison in 2012, the 55-year-old Russian allegedly stoked violence from Sierra Leone to Afghanistan by bartering deals for planes and guns.
Expectations of a prisoner swap grew in recent months, after Russian leader Vladimir Putin and US President Joe Biden discussed his fate during a summit in Geneva in 2021. His appearances at court in Thailand, wearing a bullet-proof vest and shackles while flanked by armed police commandos, and the often tearful responses of his wife, Alla Bout, added to the drama of the case.
In 2012, a US judge sentenced Bout to 25 years in prison for conspiring to sell a massive arsenal to anti-American guerrillas in Colombia. Prosecutors in the United States said the arms he sold or brokered fuelled conflicts and supported regimes in Afghanistan, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Sudan.
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