Russian businessman described ‘inhumane’ conditions in US prisons and ridiculed claims he armed the Taliban
In his first major interview since coming out, Viktor Bout, a man the US says was a major arms trafficker, spoke to RT on Saturday. Bout was returned to Russia on Thursday in a high-profile prisoner swap for basketball player Brittney Griner. During the chat, the businessman revealed his ways of staying sane behind bars, talked about the conflict in Ukraine and whether he thinks the US might be on the verge of an uprising .
Arm the Taliban
Bout served 12 years in US prisons for arms trafficking which he denies. Although he escaped Taliban captivity in the mid-1990s, several US media reported this week that he supplied up to 200 Soviet T-90 tanks to Afghan Islamists. This claim apparently originated in an anonymous source report by Germany’s Der Spiegel in 2002.
“No, I had no relationship with the Taliban”, he told RT. “The Taliban put a price on my head. How can you say that I worked with the Taliban?
Regarding the supposed delivery of tanks to the militants, Bout asked how he could have succeeded “200 flights to Afghanistan” and hammered the US media for failing to provide any evidence to support the claim.
“Even Soviet propaganda has understood that there are limits” he said. “At least a few truths had to be told.”
The Plea Agreement As Bout maintains his innocence, he says he accepted a plea deal to serve 25 years because “what were we supposed to do?” However, he said his attempts to change lawyers before signing the deal were thwarted by his public defender, who misled him into staying with her and admitting guilt.
“How can you trust this system when it’s working against you?” he argued.
Prison conditions Bout said guards would withhold food from troublesome inmates and leave cell lights on overnight, all in what he called a Nazi-inspired attempt to “breaking a person’s will. He described the quality of food served to prisoners as “inhuman” and says he “lost a lot of weight” while incarcerated in the United States.
However, the “biggest challenge” he faced behind bars only received one phone call to his family each month.
The prison population
Bout spent much of his time at Marion, Illinois, US Penitentiary in solitary confinement, before being housed with the facility’s general population beginning in 2016.
The majority of inmates were African American and Hispanic, Bout told RT. He added that “Most of my fellow inmates were sympathetic to Russia. Or at least if they didn’t know, they would ask me questions.
Bout passed the time by reading and learning several foreign languages, but recalled that drug use was common among his fellow inmates. “If this happens in a prison, just imagine what happens on the street,” he said.
About Ukraine Bout told RT that he views the sanctions imposed on him by the United States as a “experience,” and a warning to his fellow Russians. As such, he was not surprised when the West responded to Russia’s military operation in Ukraine with economic sanctions.
“I fully support the special military operation”, he said, arguing that Russia should have sent its troops to Donbass in 2014.
“If I could, I would share the skills I have and I would gladly volunteer,” he stated.
Griner Dating When Bout learned of Griner’s arrest on television, he recalled an inmate approaching him and telling him “It’s your ticket home.” While the businessman said he had no hope the two would meet on the tarmac in Abu Dhabi on Thursday in the swap.
“She wanted to shake my hand” Bout said of Griner. “You could feel she was really positive.”
An American Revolution? When asked if he would rather see Joe Biden or Donald Trump in the White House, Bout compared the two to “Zero Coke and Diet Pepsi” adding that the Russians “paying too much attention to American politics.”
“I don’t believe they will have a revolution in the United States,” he said, referring to the political division in the country. Bout elaborated, arguing that excessive drug use makes young Americans too passive “do anything,” while Washington ruthlessly punishes dissent, as it did when it jailed Trump supporters who protested Biden’s election victory on Capitol Hill last January.
