The Russian government went from decrying his arrest as illegal to claiming that it had nothing to hide and that Bout should have to answer all questions in a court of law. After he was convicted, Russia sanctioned every US Justice Department official involved in the case.
Bout was sentenced in 2011 to serve 25 years in a Federal penitentiary.
Russia considers Bout a political prisoner.
Russia’s Offer to Exchange Griner for Bout Was Almost Immediate
When Brittney Griner was arrested this year, the Russian government wasted no time in suggesting exchanging her for Bout. As related by the New York Times in a July 1, 2002 story and quoting Bout’s New York attorney, Steve Zissou, the Russian ambassador met with him in June and “..told him the release of Mr. Bout was a very high priority for the Russian government.”
It seems obvious that negotiations over the exchange of Griner for Bout began months ago and that the Biden Administration was under enormous pressure to make a deal for her release. In June, a large group of voter organizations representing women, people of color, and the LGBTQ communities sent Biden a letter urging him to make a deal for Griner’s release. These groups included the National Action Network, the National Organization for Women, the Human Rights Campaign, and the National Urban League.
Detractors are saying that US citizen Paul Whelan was the better candidate for release in any exchange. In June 2020, Whelan was convicted in a Russian court of espionage and sentenced to 16 years. Sgt Whelan was a Marine Reservist who was court-martialed in 2008 for multiple counts of larceny. He was given two months restriction, a bust to E4, and a Bad Conduct Discharge. Whelan was in Russia for the wedding of another former Marine. It is alleged that he had $80,000 in his possession that was temporarily confiscated by Russian authorities. He was arrested in his hotel room in Moscow shortly after being given a flash drive by a Russian “friend” that contained the names of Russian border guards. Whelan claims he thought the flash drive contained holiday pictures.
Whelan had told friends and family that he knew people in the Russian Security Service, the FSB. He was most likely set up by them as well. It’s an old KGB trick used to arrest US military officers visiting East Berlin during the Cold War. An East German strikes up a conversation with the US officer in a cafe or bar, offers him an American magazine or newspaper he has with him saying he is finished reading it, and KGB agents swoop in to arrest the officer as soon as he takes it from the stranger. The magazine contains several pages of “classified” material hidden in the pages. Another trick was to trail an American riding in a taxi with the passenger window down. A scooter bike pulls up next to the cab and the rider tosses a manilla envelope on the seat next to the American. Again, the KGB swoops in immediately and arrests the American in possession of classified information. During the Cold War, US military officers visiting the communist block were extensively briefed on how to avoid being entrapped this way. Keep the taxi windows rolled up, and accept nothing from a stranger on the street or in a restaurant, bar, or cafe. Assume your hotel room is bugged, and assume any female who approaches you in a friendly manner to be a Soviet agent. Depending on what you did in the military the risk of being scooped up was so high, some service members were forbidden from getting within 90 miles of the border of any communist country. This 90-mile limit would allow one to still visit Key West, Florida which is 90 miles from Cuba.
According to former National Security Advisor John Bolton, the Russians offered to exchange Whelan for Bout in 2018 and the Trump administration rejected it. Not because of who Whelan was, but because of who Viktor Bout is, as he said to the New York Post yesterday, “Obviously, there are legitimate exchanges of prisoners of war,” he said. “But this doesn’t even approximate that. The idea that somehow what Brittney Griner did — very foolishly, in my estimate — but that whatever she did compares to Viktor Bout is something that shows just how desperate the administration was to make this deal.”
Paul Whelan, did not have the political muscle behind his release that Brittany Griner did. President Biden wasn’t writing him letters of support and encouragement. Neither does Marc Fogel. Fogel was a history teacher at the Anglo-American School in Moscow and was arrested in August 2021, for entering Russia with medical marijuana prescribed to him to treat severe back pain. The Russian courts sentenced him to 14 years at hard labor, for “large-scale drugs smuggling”. He’s been in prison longer on almost the same charges as Griner.
Bolton has a point, prisoner exchanges need to be on a par level for good reasons. When CIA pilot Gary Powers was shot down flying a U-2 spy mission over the USSR in 1960, he was exchanged two years later for captured KGB Colonel Rudolph Abel. Both were spies, both were representing their governments. Neither were private citizens who committed minor drug offenses.
The fact that Russia previously tried to swap Whelan for Bout, suggests that Russia intended to keep arresting Americans until they found someone they could secure his release with, Neither Whelan nor Fogel was sufficient, Brittney Griner, because of her relative celebrity and the pressure of political groups was apparently enough. The pressure to make that exchange was mostly brought on President Biden by American political groups purporting to represent oppressed minorities. They seem unconcerned that most of the hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children killed by the weapons that Viktor Bout sold all over the planet were black, brown, and Hispanic.
The release of Griner who was in possession of less than a gram of hash for Bout, the “Merchant of Death” whose actions have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people is an encouragement for countries like North Korea, China, Russia, and other belligerent countries to scoop up any American they can get their hands on to exchange for terrorists we have arrested or war criminals or other illegal arms traffickers in our prisons. A future president may not agree to make such a lop-sided deal in the future, but that will be no comfort for any American rotting in a foreign prison on some minor charge.
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