Part I.
Victor Bout was a successful entrepreneur. Not the good kind though. Probably one of the best we've ever seen at being nefarious. The best of the worst. He built a very successful business that peddled evil and exploited the bad intentions of many nations.
In many circles, he's known as the “merchant of death”. In the early 1990s he discovered how to use Russian planes to ship deadly weapons all over the developing world.
At his height, he made the United Arab Emirates his distribution hub sold across the war torn world. I'm putting it lightly when I say he fed off of war-torn countries. He sold attack helicopters, anti-tank weapons, rocket propel grenades and AK-47s to local terrorist groups in these countries. In other words, he sold weapons used to burn villages and communities down with minimal effort. His biggest customers were in countries like Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Angola (notice a continental pattern?), not to mention the Taliban in Afghanistan. What's made Bout so effective was that he didn't discriminate or pick sides. He served both those who were at war… sometimes in the same country! Were he in action today, you guarantee he'd be equipping both Russia and the Ukraine.
He was intentionally known for elevating bloody conflicts into full blown wars with mass casualties. He equipped the most ill- intentioned people with the tools to destroy en masse. Escalating human toll dramatically. He gave misguided, psychologically unfit people around the world tools to kill.
Perhaps you've heard of his most popular customer? The United States of America. Flying weapons to American Troops during the Iraq War (which was a very dangerous location) approximately 140 times.
His reign ended the day he was caught by US intelligence on a sting operation as they pretended to be FARC of Columbia who pretended to want his weapons specifically to kill Americans. It should be no surprise that he had no qualms with equipping enemies of one of his former customers. In fact, he was caught on tape saying he always intended to provide someone with weapons used to kill Americans. Today he sits in Marion, IL in year 11 of his 25 year sentence.
Konstantin Yaroshenko is a Russian pilot who had been detained in Liberia by undercover DEA agents on May 28, 2010, and brought to the US. He was convicted of drug smuggling (cocaine) in 2011 and sentenced to 20 years in prison, which he had been serving at the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut.
It was not too long ago he made the news when Russia agreed to swap their American prisoner Trevor Reed who was jailed in Russia on charges of assaulting police.
The decision to swap an alleged international drug cartel worker for an alleged rough houser with a bad temper temper seems absurd on paper. Clearly these crimes are not equal. However the swap was executed as if they were.
The prisoner swap was no easy decision. But it was made. The fact remains that when the buck stops with you, you have no other measuring stick to judge you other than history itself. Harry Truman, who was tasked with quite possibly the toughest decision in our nation’s history can attest to this. Never had a nuclear weapon been used until that point, and never has it been used since.
Our 46th President faces a uniquely difficult decision if his own that will undoubtedly be talked about for well after he is gone.
That involves swapping the infamous Victor Bout with the equally famous American in Brittney Griner.
Part 2 next week.
…….