Viktor Anatolyevich Bout (lang-ru?????? ??????????? ???) (born 13 January 1967 near Dushanbe, Tajik SSR (Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic), Soviet Union) established a number of air cargo companies and is famous for being a suspected arms dealer.

A former Soviet military translator, Bout made a significant amount of money through his many air transport companies, shipping cargo mostly in Africa and the Middle East during the 1990s and early 2000s.Citation neededdate=July 2009 Just as willing to ship cargo for Charles Taylor (Charles Taylor (Liberia)) in Liberia as he was for the United Nations in Sudan and the United States in Iraq, Bout may have facilitated huge arms shipments into various civil wars in Africa with his private air cargo fleets during the 1990s.

While claiming to have done little more than provide logistics, he has been called a "sanctions buster" by former British (United Kingdom) Foreign Office minister (Minister (diplomacy)) Peter Hain who described Bout as "the principal conduit for planes and supply routes that take arms... from east Europe, principally Bulgaria, Moldova and Ukraine to Liberia and Angola."

Peter Hain has also called Bout a "merchant of death," and an eponymous book by Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun details investigations of Bout by the US and others. Douglas Farah, when interviewed by the magazine Mother Jones (Mother Jones (magazine)), said, "It is important to note, as we do in the book, that much of what Viktor Bout does is, while reprehensible, not illegal."