Legendary Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, the “Merchant of Death” freed in President Joe Biden’s lopsided December 2022 prisoner exchange for WNBA star Brittney Griner, claimed on Monday that U.S. media reports of him returning to the arms trade were “fake news” and clickbait.
Bout told Russia’s state Tass news agency that the allegations in a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article on Monday that said he was selling small arms to the Iran-backed Houthi terrorists of Yemen were “baseless” and a “flash in the information field.”
According to the WSJ article, Houthi emissaries found themselves dealing with Bout when they visited Moscow in August, hoping to buy $10 million worth of automatic weapons. The article said the deal has not yet been finalized.
Bout said the WSJ “long ago shifted from being a strictly economic outlet, traditionally covering financial and economic matters, to becoming a biased political media.” His “evidence” for this assertion was Russia’s completely unsubstantiated and fanciful persecution of WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich.
The regime of President Vladimir Putin arrested Gershkovich on trumped-up charges of espionage in March 2023 while he was reporting from the city of Yekaterinburg. Gershkovich was held for over a year before the Russian government bothered to charge him with anything, and then it announced a bizarre conspiracy theory that Gershkovich was “gathering secret information for the CIA.”
Not a shred of evidence for these allegations was ever produced, but Gershkovich was sentenced to 16 years in prison in a secret July 2024 “trial” – an obvious prelude to using him in as a hostage for a prisoner swap with the Biden administration later that month.
Every human rights and press freedom organization in the world denounced the Gershkovich case as a travesty, but to Viktor Bout it was ironclad proof that the WSJ was working as an arm of the U.S. government.
“We know this particularly from the case of Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter who was caught red-handed and arrested in Yekaterinburg. It was proved during the trial that he had acted under cover and collected intelligence for the CIA while working for the newspaper. This is why reports by such media outlets should be viewed primarily through the prism of who the report benefits and what news hook it seeks to create,” he claimed.
Bout blasted other U.S. media outlets for “hyping up the arms dealer image they promoted in the past.”
No one promoted the Merchant of Death more energetically than Bout himself, whose infamy as an arms dealer made him the subject of a Hollywood movie. He made billions selling weapons scavenged from the collapsing Soviet Union to Third World armies, insurgent groups, and terrorists, including al-Qaeda and Hezbollah.
Bout’s capture in 2008, while he was attempting to sell surface-to-air missiles to the FARC terrorists of Colombia, was a massive international law enforcement project. The charges against him included conspiring to kill American citizens. Veterans of that operation were furious with the Biden administration for letting Bout go, warning that he remained a huge risk to international security.
Bout told Tass that Western media have not given him credit for rehabilitating and going into Russian politics. Bout was elected to the regional assembly of the Ulyanovsk province in September, running as a member of the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party. His career change came as little comfort to Western security officials, who said Bout gaining power and influence as a politician after Biden released him was one of the scenarios they were most worried about.
