Viktor Bout, who was freed from the US in exchange for the basketball player Brittney Griner, has said that he will volunteer to go and fight for Russia amid the ongoing war in Ukraine, if that was possible, according to a report from Newsweek.
Viktor Bout was giving an interview to Gazeta.ru, in which he said that he supports Putin’s decision to go to war with Ukraine. Bout expressed bewilderment that the Russia-Ukraine war did not occur earlier. “A Russian man like me, I never understood why we didn’t do this earlier,” he said, according to the report.
He also said that the West wants to destroy Russia. “The West believes that they did not finish us off in 1990, when the Soviet Union began to disintegrate….They think that they can just destroy us again and divide Russia,” he said to Russia Today. However, whilst speaking about common Americans, he said that he did not experience any Russophobia during his time in prison. He claimed that many people he talked with expressed sympathy for Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin has garnered a lot of praise from Russian media for securing Bout’s release.
