So: The “Merchant of Death” is back to selling arms to the world’s worst, just two years after getting sprung from a US prison in the Bide♏n-Harris deal with Vladimir Putin to get WNBA star Brittney Griner released from a Russian internment camp.
So much for the dealmakers’ promises that Viktor Bout wouldn’t go back to his deadly work: It’s pretty clear that his “independent” sales largely served Putin’s agenda (with just enough d𓄧eniability), which is why Vlad traded to get him♓ back.
And now that he’s just closed a $10 millionꦐ deal to provide automatic weapons, including AK-47 rifles, to the ⭕Houthis — with a potential sale of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles next up.
This, as the Yemen-based terror group has largely closed the Red Sea to commercia💮l shipping by shooting at vessel♓s there (with a clear exception for Chinese-flagged ones).
And as they attack Israel and US ⭕forces in the region, too: Devil’s work that Bout’s work plainly enables.
We slammed the Bout deal when Biden and Harris closed it🐽: Not because it was wrong to work for Griner’s release after her kangeroo-court conviction, but because the White House should have gotten more than a single American back if was going to release an international war criminal who at one point was the world’s second-most-wanted after Os꧑ama bin Laden.
Letting Putin so readily win so big in these deals is a huge incentive for him to keep taking de facto hostages (always on trumped-up criminal charg🌄es).
Washington can’🌸t sit by passively, waiting for Vlad to demand the release of more monsters in exchange for his innocent captives: A good start would be finding, and🎶 freezing, the western accounts where the Russian tyrant has stashed some of his ill-gotten billions.