Viktor Bout, also known as the "merchant of death", is one of the names being floated to replace Ygeny Prigozhin at the helm of Wagner, following the plane crash in which Vladimir Putin's chef and 9 other people lost their lives. write foreign media.
Bout, born in Dusambe, the capital of Tajikistan in 1967, is a former lieutenant colonel in the Russian army and an arms dealer, nicknamed the "merchant of death" by former British foreign secretary Peter Hain.
In his youth he was enrolled in one of the branches of the Soviet secret service and studied at the academy at the Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow, learning several languages.
In the late 1980s, he was sent to Mozambique and Angola as a military translator and was discharged in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, with the rank of lieutenant colonel.
Returning to Moscow, taking advantage of the fact that military aircraft are being decommissioned and there are entire arsenals of abandoned weapons, even sophisticated ones, he buys his first aircraft and gets hold of many resale war objects.
Several bombs have also disappeared from Belarus and Ukraine, the disappearance of which, in the latter case, has been traced to Bout. While in reality it sells weapons in Africa, fueling various conflicts, officially its planes carry flowers, frozen poultry, vacuum cleaners.