Putin’s ‘Merchant of Death’ is back. This time selling arms to the Houthis.
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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer known as the “Merchant of Death," walked out of a U.S. jail almost two years ago in a trade with Moscow for U.S.
basketball star Brittney Griner. Now he is back in business, trying to broker the sale of small arms to Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militants. The 57-year-old, whose life reportedly inspired the 2005 Hollywood movie, “Lord of War," starring Nicolas Cage, spent decades selling Soviet-made weapons in Africa, South America and the Middle East before being arrested in 2008 in a U.S.
law enforcement sting operation. Since his release, Bout has joined a pro-Kremlin far-right party and won a seat in a local assembly in 2023, seemingly turning the page on his days as an arms broker. But when Houthi emissaries went to Moscow in August to negotiate the purchase of $10 million worth of automatic weapons, they encountered a familiar face: the mustachioed Bout, according to a European security official and other people familiar with the matter.
The potential arms transfers, which have yet to be delivered, stop well short of the sale of Russian antiship or anti-air missiles that could pose a significant threat to the U.S. military’s efforts to protect international shipping from the Houthis’ attacks. The Biden administration has been worried that Russia might provide the Houthis with such advanced weapons to retaliate for Washington’s support of Ukraine, but there is no evidence that those missiles have been sent, or that Bout is involved in such a deal.
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