Victor Booth's life resembles a spy thriller. Russia wants the arms dealer, who is currently in prison, back and is negotiating a prisoner swap with the United States in which he could be exchanged for Americans in Russian jails, including basketball star Brittney Griner.
Dubbed a "merchant of death" and "sanctions breaker" for his ability to circumvent arms embargoes, Bout, 55, was one of the most wanted men before his arrest in 2008 on multiple counts of arms trafficking.
For nearly two decades, Booth was the most notorious arms dealer, selling weapons to rogue states, rebel groups and murderous extremists in Africa, Asia and South America.
He is so notorious that his life served as the inspiration for the 2005 Hollywood film Lord of War, in which Nicolas Cage plays Yuri Orlov, an arms dealer whose character is loosely based on Booth.
Booth is a gifted linguist, who later used his knowledge of English, French, Portuguese, Arabic and Persian to build an arms trading empire
Despite this, Bhut's origins remain shrouded in mystery. It is widely believed that he was born in 1967 in Dushanbe, then the capital of Soviet Tajikistan, near the border with Afghanistan.
A gifted linguist who later used his knowledge of English, French, Portuguese, Arabic and Persian to build an arms-dealing empire, Bout reportedly attended an Esperanto club in Dushanbe as a boy and mastered the universal language, Reuters points out.
He then spent a period in the Soviet Army, where Booth said he reached the rank of lieutenant, serving as a military translator including in Angola, a country that would later become key to his business.
Bhutto's big break came in the days after the fall of the Communist bloc in 1989-91, when he was able to cash in on a stockpile of discarded Soviet-era weapons to fuel fratricidal civil wars in Africa, Asia and beyond.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union's large air fleet, Bout was able to purchase a squadron of about 60 old Soviet aircraft stationed in the United Arab Emirates, which he was able to supply to clients around the world.
Business before politics
A 2007 biography, The Merchant of Death: Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Enables War, by Douglas Farah and Stephen Brown provided few details about Booth's dark trade. Reuters could not independently confirm the accuracy of those descriptions.
From a base in the city of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, he imported his arms trade with a seemingly innocuous logistics business, always insisting that he was a legitimate entrepreneur with respectable clients and that he had nothing to answer for.
According to biographers, Bhut always put business before politics, so in Afghanistan he sold weapons to the Islamist Taliban rebels and their pro-Western opponents.
Despite this, Bout, who first appeared on the radar of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) after reports of a suspected Russian national dealing arms in Africa, was one of the most wanted men in the world at the beginning of the millennium.
However, Booth, whose clients included rebel groups and militias from the Congo to Angola to Liberia, had no problem with his ideology of putting business ahead of politics.
In Afghanistan, he sold weapons to the Islamist Taliban rebels and their pro-Western opponents, according to the book "Merchant of Death".
He allegedly supplied weapons to former Liberian President Charles Taylor, now serving a 50-year prison sentence for murder, rape and terrorism, as well as various factions in Congo and the Philippine Islamist militant group Abu Sayyaf.
The end came only in 2008, after a thorough and swift operation by the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) following Bhut through several countries to a luxury hotel in Bangkok.
During the spectacular operation, Bout was filmed agreeing to sell 100 surface-to-air missiles to US agents, posing as members of the Colombian leftist guerrilla group FARK, which they would use to kill US soldiers. Soon after, he was arrested by the Thai police.
After more than two years of diplomatic friction in which Russia loudly insisted that Bout was innocent and that his case was politically motivated, Bout was extradited to the United States to face a raft of charges, including conspiracy to support terrorists, conspiracy to kill Americans and money laundering money.
Bhutto was tried on charges related to FARK, which he denied, and in 2012 he was found guilty and sentenced in a Manhattan courtroom to 25 years in prison, the minimum sentence possible for those crimes.
Since then, Russia has been desperate to get him back.
Trade for two Americans?
The United States and Russia said on August 5 that they were ready to negotiate a prisoner exchange, a day after basketball star Brittney Griner was sentenced to nine years in prison for smuggling e-cigarettes containing cannabis oil into Russia.
At the trial, Grinerova, who has since been transferred to a penal colony in Mordovia, said that she used cannabis to relieve pain from a sports injury and that she did not want to break the law. She told the court that she made a mistake when she packed the oil in her luggage.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov announced yesterday that a prisoner exchange agreement involving Bhutto is possible.
"Viktor But is among those being discussed, and we are certainly counting on a positive result," said Ryabkov for the Interfax agency.
Sources familiar with the situation told Reuters that Booth had offered to trade Booth for Griner and former US Marine Paul Whelan, who was sentenced to 2020 years in prison in 16 for espionage.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that Bhutto's extradition from Thailand was a "clear injustice" and asserted that he was innocent.
Russian media often referred to an interview from 2012 with the judge who presided over his trial in New York and who said that his 25-year sentence was "excessive" in arguing for Buto's return home.
Earlier this year, there was speculation that Booth would be traded for Trevor Reed, a US Marine veteran who had been sentenced to prison for assault. Reed was eventually released and exchanged for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot who had been convicted of drug smuggling in the US.
Reuters points out that some experts believe that the Russian state's continued interest in Bhutto, along with his skills and connections in the international arms trade, strongly points to Russian intelligence ties.
In interviews, Booth said he attended the Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow, which serves as training for military intelligence officers.
"Bout is almost certainly a GRU agent, or at least connected to the GRU," Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russian security services, told Reuters about the Russian military intelligence agency.
"His case is famous, and the Russian intelligence services desperately want to show that they are not abandoning their people," Galeoti said.
According to Christopher Miller, a journalist who has been in contact with neo-Nazis who are in prison with Bout in Illinois, the former arms dealer has a photo of Russian President Vladimir Putin in his cell and allegedly says that Ukraine should not exist as a country.
Reuters managed to get in touch with Bout's wife, Alla, who lives in St. Petersburg, via the WhatsApp application, and she said: "We are very hopeful that everything will be resolved and that an agreement will be reached."
"Now we can only pray," she added.
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