Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, detained in the United States for 14 years and exchanged for American basketball player Brittney Griner, accused the West of wanting to “destroy” and “divide” Russia, in an interview published this Friday.
“Westerners think they didn’t finish us off in 1990, when the Soviet Union started to fall apart,” Bout, a former Soviet officer, told Russian outlet RT.
“And the fact that we are trying to live, not to be ruled by anyone and not to depend on anyone, to be a true independent power (…) This is, of course, a shocking novelty for them. They think it can destroy us again and divide Russia,” he continued.
arms seller
On Thursday, after lengthy negotiations, Washington agreed to hand over to Moscow the 55-year-old man, detained in 2008 during a US operation in Thailand, in exchange for basketball player Brittney Griner, detained in Russia for months over a cannabis case.
Born, according to a United Nations report, in 1967 in Dushanbe, the capital of the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan, Viktor Bout studied at the Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow, before joining the Air Force.
He was able, from 1991 and the fall of the USSR, according to his accusers, to take advantage of the post-Soviet chaos to acquire a quantity of weapons at low cost in military bases delivered to themselves and officers in search of ways to enrich themselves or simply to survive.
A film inspired by his life.
He entered American popular culture in 2005, when the film “Lord of War” was released, inspired by his life, and in which Nicolas Cage plays an arms dealer hunted by Interpol. In his interview with RT published on Friday, Viktor Bout commented on this Hollywood-forged reputation.
“If they had come to me and asked me questions, they probably would have come up with a more interesting story. To me, right now, Hollywood is just a Washington propaganda outlet,” he said, devastated.
Source: BFM TV
