Unfair exchange is robbery

If you accept this logical transposition of a well-known proverb, then the US has been robbed blind. Its government has also gone back – yet again – on its commitment never to negotiate with terrorists.

These melancholy observations follow from the prisoner exchange between the US and Russia. America got back her heavily tattooed basketball star Brittney Griner. Russia reclaimed the international arms smuggler Victor Bout, affectionately nicknamed the “Merchant of Death”.

I have to admit to a personal interest in Mr Bout and his illustrious career, for he is my namesake, one of the few in Russia. Though spelled differently, his is the same name. (When issuing passports for foreign travel, the Russian Interior Ministry insists on spelling all names the French way, whereas mine is spelled phonetically in English.)

The name is so rare that I once used it to get an otherwise unavailable booking at a Petersburg restaurant. “My name is Boot,” I intoned on the phone in an uncharacteristically weighty manner. A table materialised miraculously: they assumed I was either Victor himself or his close relation.

Bout’s name is such an instant door-opener in Russia because he is a local hero. A high-ranking officer in the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence, he began to be used by the post-Soviet government as its shadowy deniable operator.

Bout ‘bought’ several transport planes and started his own arms smuggling company. I put ‘bought’ in quotes because a Soviet officer’s salary didn’t quite stretch to a fleet of airplanes. Bout bought his planes in the same sense in which Russian mafioso oligarchs bought up Russia’s natural resources – as a practically free transfer of assets in exchange for unwavering loyalty and some unspecified future services. (If you’ve seen The Godfather, you are familiar with the transaction.)

The strategy of both the Soviet and post-Soviet governments has always been to stir every malodorous substance in every part of the world, creating troubled waters in which evildoers can then profitably fish.

Instigating and conflagrating regional conflicts is an essential part of that strategy, especially in vulnerable parts of the world. The Soviets armed various wicked regimes and splinter groups more or less openly, whereas their heirs initially tried to keep up a civilised façade. That’s where my namesake came in.

He became known as both a sanctions-buster and a gun-runner, arming murderous gangs and rebels in Angola, Zaire, Liberia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Columbia and anywhere else where bloodstained chaos could be fomented.

In the process, Bout accumulated an endless list of charges, including for forgery and money laundering, on every continent except perhaps Antarctica. The chickens finally came to roost in 2008.

In a sting operation led by the US DEA, an agent posing as a representative of the Columbian terrorist group FARC negotiated with Bout for the supply of 109 surface-to-air missiles and armour-piercing rocket launchers. (You didn’t think he was just flogging AKs, did you?)

He was lured into Thailand, arrested by the local police, tried and convicted for terrorism and conspiracy. Two years later Bout was extradited to the US and sentenced to 25 years for conspiracy to kill US citizens.

Russia protested all along, claiming Bout was an upstanding individual, a paragon of virtue and a man incapable of committing the heinous crimes of which he was so unfairly accused. He was, after all, a GRU officer and hence a gentleman.

Putin’s bloodhounds were so incensed that they even declared that the US judges and officials involved in the trial would be for ever denied entry visas should they wish to visit Bout’s birthplace. And of course the Russians never stopped trying to get their boy back.

In addition to pursuing normal diplomatic channels, they resorted to their more natural terroristic methods: arresting US citizens and sentencing them to long prison terms in the hope of exchanging them for Bout and other agents.

One of those Americans was the businessman and former marine Paul Whelan, sentenced to 16 years on a trumped-up espionage charge in 2020. Another was Miss Griner, who pleaded guilty to having a few hashish oil ampules in her luggage and was sentenced to nine years for smuggling.

While Whelan was innocent of the charges and Griner wasn’t, we aren’t going to get bogged down in the fine points of Russian jurisprudence, are we? Whatever the two Americans did or didn’t do, they were in fact hostages, to be used as bargaining chips by a state internationally recognised as terrorist.

And the US played along, pretending not to recognise the terrorist nature of the situation. At first American officials wanted to swap the Merchant of Death for both Whelan and Griner, correctly claiming that Bout was a more important figure than either of them.

Say what you will about my namesake, but he was indeed a heavy hitter, with expertise going far beyond Miss Griner’s dribbling and jump shots and even Mr Whelan’s knack at managing corporate security.

In the end Americans had to settle for Griner only. I don’t know if they were given the choice but, had they been, I’m sure they would have chosen Miss Griner anyway.

After all, she ticks many more boxes. First, Griner, 6’9’’, is a star, known to everyone who follows women’s basketball (I don’t know what sort of numbers we’re talking here). Second, she is black. And third she is an open lesbian, ‘married’ to another woman. You must agree that such credentials are both unimpeachable and unbeatable.

But swapping this heroic woman for Bout is tantamount to succumbing to terrorist demands. You don’t need me to tell you why such surrender is ill-advised: it encourages further acts of terrorism.

The Russians are in effect given an invitation to kidnap any Western citizen and use him as a blackmail weapon, securing the release of criminals like Bout. Since Russia is self-admittedly waging war on the West, this is a legitimate ruse de guerre.

But then equally legitimate would be response in kind. Many children of Russian government officials live in the West, and most of them – including our newly hatched Lord Lebedev – subsist, directly or indirectly, on the proceeds of their parents’ criminal activities.

That provides sufficient legal grounds, especially in wartime, to pick them up and use them the way the Russians use their Western hostages. Yet anyone who thinks Western governments are capable of protecting their citizens in that manner holds an unjustifiably optimistic view of Western politics.

Hence I can confidently predict that the Russians will persist with their terrorism, which we’ll refuse to recognise as such. And they’ll continue to be as successful as they were with this lamentable swap.

P.S. I fear for Peter Hitchens’s mental health: the man clearly suffers from what psychiatrists call ‘perseveration’, the urge to repeat the same things over and over again. Thus in today’s column he repeats for the umpteenth time that Russia was ‘provoked’ into her genocidal raid on the Ukraine, which Mr Hitchens professes to regret.

That claim would be more credible if over the past two years he hadn’t talked our ear off about “conservative and Christian” Putin, the strong leader Hitchens wished we had and the last bastion of traditional values.

That was the official line peddled by the Kremlin propaganda – as is the current one, about Russia having been provoked into mass murder, torture, rape and looting. Vlad has no better friend in the West than our perseverated hack.