SOURCE: ( ) https://medium.com/@x_TomCooper_x/ukraine-war-17-december-2022-supplement-who-is-victor-bout-af15deffcde2
[ https://youtu.be/TgNoxETzySI ]
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Ukraine War, 17 Dec 2022, Supplement
: Who is Victor Bout?
You might have caught related reports: on 8 December, Moscow and Washington announced an extremely unusual ‘swap of prisoners’. Putin’s regime released the US basketball player Brittney Griner (arrested and sentenced for ‘possession of drugs illegal in Russia’), in exchange for Washington releasing certain Russian citizen Victor Bout…
Now, to many youngsters, that name isn’t going to ring any bells. When one googles ‘Victor Bout’, it quickly turns out his origins are unclear. Some say he’s a Russian from Dushanbe in Tajikistan; that he graduated from the Soviet Military Institute of Foreign Languages and is fluent in at least five-six foreign languages; and that he served in the Soviet Army as a translator. Some places might mention his service in Angola, but others are going to almost deny this, stressing that Bout spent only a few weeks there. Back in the 1990s, the story was that he was ‘actually a Ukrainian’…. Finally, he should’ve been discharged from service upon the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel… those depending on popular culture for their information might associate him with the movie Lord of War and similar mythology.
By no means do I want to say that I know anything special about Bout. I merely run into his name — and activities — time and again during research about different conflicts of the 1990s, and this resulted in a slightly different impression of him than is usually provided in the public: nothing like a ‘cold-blooded merchant of death’, rather a ‘typical bi-product of the System Putin’.
Correspondingly: Bout served with a unit of the Soviet Military Transport Aviation (V-TA) forward deployed to Mozambique, back in the 1980s. While some say he was an officer of the KGB, he’s denying this, and I tend to agree with him: for characters like me, his curriculum vitae is reading like that of a GRU. …which is a less famous, but much more serious, and military service. And, when one reads books like Catherine Belton’s Putin’s People (yes, I know: that one again….), the fog surrounding such characters and their activities is clearing before soon. But, let me start with the start…
The V-TA unit to which Bout was assigned was hauling cargo all over Africa, but primarily to Mozambique: during the 1980s, the Soviets had a sizeable detachment of ‘advisors’ deployed in the country. They were ‘instructing’ the regimes of Samora Machel, and then Joaquim Alberto Chissano in ‘re-education’ of the local population, and the resulting RENAMO insurgency. To the point where Soviet crews flew Mi-24 helicopter gunships and MiGs that were razing one village after the other [ https://draft.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/7881121750623742708/2548788762995489807 ]
No idea how much was Bout involved in such operations, but he certainly ended up traveling around Africa quite a lot, establishing good contacts that were to prove decisive for his future once the GRU and KGB decided to save the savings of the Soviet Communist Party by investing these abroad, as soon as the future dissolution of the USSR became obvious to them (which was the case already as of 1987–1988).
Point is: Bout must’ve started setting up his own air cargo business already before 1991, when his unit was disbanded, because it was well before the end of that year that he was in charge of four Antonov An-8 transports (aircraft rarely seen outside the USSR) based in Luanda, Angola. One of his major early activities was to use these aircraft for exporting tulps from South Africa to the Netherlands: he would buy them at a price of US$1 apiece, and sell them for US$2 apiece. The fleet was rapidly reinforced through three Antonov An-12s, because the combination of operating a fleet of ‘anonymous’ aircraft, operated by ‘anonymous’ crews (from the former USSR), and earning such handsome profits enabled Bout to bribe people of influence and thus obtain so-called ‘end-user certificates’ for ‘more sensitive’ export-import adventures that were to follow.
Please keep in mind that the early 1990s were the times before the internet, and long before computer-supported registrations of aircraft became widespread. The airspace over most of Africa of the early 1990s was actually not subject to any form of official control: what became known as the ‘Gauntlet’ — the vast area stretching from the southern Sahara Desert to the Limpopo River — was not covered by any kind of air traffic control (ATC) or even military radar surveillance. Thus, whatever aircraft entered the Gauntlet, nobody really knew where they went, where they landed, what were they unloading, nor what were they loading. This became Bout’s playground for the next decade…. ‘or so’…
By 1992, Bout expanded his activity and registered a company in the Free Trade Zone of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates: this became the actual main hub for the mass of his activities and included a true ‘air base’ with maintenance facilities for his aircraft. Georg Mader, an acquittance of mine working for Jane’s Defence, visited the place two times in the 2000s, to find it brimming full of An-8s, An-12s, An-26s, brand new spare engines still packed in their transportation containers, ground crews overhauling aircraft etc.
By around 1995, Bout became ‘present’ at Ostend International, in Belgium, too — in cooperation with Michael-Victor Tomas from France, and Ronald de Smet from Belgium (and, by sheer accident: a former official of the Gecamines) — set up the company named Trans Aviation Group (TAN). This was just one such enterprise: other of Bout’s companies — all linked to a number of lovely governments or establishments around the African continent, in the Middle East, or elsewhere — included Cessavia, Air Cess Rwanda, Air Cess Equatorial Guinea, Air Cess Holdings Ltd., Air Cess Incorporated, Air Cess Liberia, Air Cess Swaziland (Pty.) Ltd., Air Pas, Air Pass, CES-AVIA, Chess Air Group, Pietersburg Aviation Services & Systems, and even the US-registered Air Cess Miami. Regardless of the name, all usually had their official address given with the P.O. Box 3962 and/or 7837, in Sharjah, UAE. In the few cases when this address was not used, it was a P.O. Box in Islamabad, in Pakistan, or in Entebbe, in Uganda.
Combined, these — and a few other, ‘associated’ — companies operated around 20 different aircraft of Soviet/Russian origin, or were chartering/leasing numerous Western transport aircraft. For example, the Boeing 707 with registration 5N-OCL, operated by Overnight Cargo Nigeria; or the Ostend-based Boeing 707 with registration N21AZ, officially operated by Seagreen Air Transport. Or the Sharjah-based An-8 with registration EL-AKZ…It all depended on the size and urgency of the shipment in question.
What was Bout’s aircraft carrying? Most of the time, it was arms and ammunition. Mind: back in the 1990s, everybody in Europe was in the process of disarming, and there were immense stocks of arms, equipment, military vehicles, ammunition, etc. — which nobody needed. Indeed, many governments in Eastern Europe were happy to earn some extra cash by getting rid of ‘all of that’, big style. It was sufficient to obtain export permits if the ‘customer’ was able to issue a ‘decent’ (even if forged) end-user certificate. And Bout was excelling in this discipline.
More precisely: Bout was delivering to whoever was able to pay, almost everything they were demanding, and the business went as far as to be officially advertised by several additional lovely governments, ‘in between’. For example, even in the early 2000s, the author of this article run into a representative of the Assad Regime of Syria, proudly showing him a CD with a ‘catalog’ offered by one of Bout’s enterprises. Sufficient to say: this included not only the omnipresent Kalashnikov assault rifles (i.e. assault rifles of the Soviet AK/AKM-design, also manufactured in a host of other countries), or related ammunition, but T-72 and T-80 main battle tanks, and MiG-29 supersonic interceptors. In turn, if the customer wasn’t able to pay in cash, Bout was willing to accept gold, diamonds, or — in the case of Rwandans and Ugandans — koltan lifted from the Congo… (and if you wonder what is koltan: just some nifty rare mineral, without which no smartphones would function).
Now, in the West, Bout is best known for selling (and transhipping) arms to governments and insurgents in Liberia and Sierra Leone, ‘early on’, and to Afghanistan, ‘later on’. With hindsight, I would say that profits from his activities there were peanuts in comparison to what was there to earn from his activities in Uganda, Rwanda, and then the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
Bout’s involvement in this part of Africa began in the early 1990s when Uganda was buying arms and ammo from him. Uganda and — probably: the USA, too — then began paying him for arms and ammo for the Rwandan Patriotic Front’s invasion of Rwanda, which culminated in the well-known genocide of 1994. No idea who paid him to gun-run for ex-Rwandan Interhamwe militias, a year later: meanwhile, these were living as refugees in the DRC, so it could be it was the French or whoever else… Uganda, Rwanda, and the USA then paid Bout to support the Rwandan invasion of the DRC in 1996 — during the I Congo War — with arms and ammo, but with transportation services, too. Two years later, during the II Congo War, his involvement went so far that Bout was simultaneously providing arms and services to (at least) five different parties involved in this conflict, and at odds with each other: Rwanda, Uganda, Sudan, Libya, and Angola. I wouldn’t be surprised if he became involved with the sixth party, too: Zimbabwe.
Between others, Bout’s aircraft paid for by Libya transported Chadian troops that fought on the side of the DRC’s government; Libyan ally Sudan chartered aircraft by Bout to lift combatants that fought against that government; while — though foremost — Rwanda not only continued purchasing arms and ammo from him, but paid Bout to evacuate its crack troops from northern Angola, where these fled after failing to capture Kinshasa and topple the government, in August 1998 (the ‘operation’ in question included about a dozen of Bout’s aircraft, and was run on Christmas Day of the same year… if anybody is curious, the story is told to its full in the book Great Lakes Conflagration).
Now, there was a number of — actually — big wars going on all over Africa were the 1990s, and thus the demand for and the expenditure of arms and ammo were immense. Indeed, the mass of deals was anything else than ‘few boxes with Kalashnikovs in a Land Rover’. Rather unsurprisingly, exports run by Bout reached a proportion where the available stocks in Eastern Europe began to dry up. Therefore, Bout began purchasing ammo from different arms manufacturing companies in East Europe: from Bulgaria, for example, and using end-user certificates of Togo, Air Cess was exporting ammo to UNITA in Angola, and when the local government became concerned about this, then Bout provided his services, too…
Elsewhere, Bout became involved in trafficking arms and ammo to — between others — Ahmad Shah Massoud, in Afghanistan: from 1995, Massouds’s movement, which fought on the side of the internationally recognized government, was facing an onslaught of the Pakistan-supported Taliban. Arguably, Massoud had no money. However, he was supported, extensively, by the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) of India: something like ‘The Indian CIA’. Rather ironically, US intelligence services — probably confused by ‘all the turban-wearers over there’, as so often before and after– thus began suspecting Bout of selling and transporting arms and ammo to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. This is something he has always denied.
Point is this: although Bout’s activities were clearly violating numerous international arms embargos, nobody cared at all about what was he buying and transporting through the 1990s. The few that did care were repeatedly confused by his constant moving of locations, new companies, re-registered aircraft, etc. At most, some US and European arms merchants began copying his methods. In other cases, governments of the USA, France, etc. began paying him to transport arms, ammo, and equipment for their own, or allied forces. For example, in 2003, the Pentagon contracted him to haul supplies to Iraq.
Meanwhile, and rather gradually, Bout became a subject of multiple investigations in the West, and thus ‘retired’ to Russia. In 2008, he was enticed out in a sting operation by the US DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency): After appearing in Thailand for negotiations for ‘another major arms deal’, he was arrested on charges of conspiracy to acquire and use an anti-aircraft missile, to provide material support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations and similar. Two years later, he was extradited to the USA, and then prosecuted and convicted to 25 years in prison.
As far as I happen to know, Bout might not have been a personal friend of Putin, but at least ‘quite close’ to that, and the Russian dictator was certainly keen to have him back — especially from a prison in the USA. Unsurprisingly, Moscow was quick to declare his exchange into a sort of major victory.
[ https://youtu.be/bjnNdaNC0vU ]
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