Add another complication to the tangle of relations–with a happy face–that is the U.S.-Russian relationship. It does not concern nuclear weapons, Iran, missile defense, Saakashvili’s Georgia or even Vladamir Putin’s creepy penchant for baring his pecs. Rather the dispute centers around an alleged criminal, whom Russia authorities seem intent on protecting from prosecution.

Viktor Bout, a renegade Russian arms trafficker, known at various times, with multiple passports, as a the “Merchant of Death” and the “Lord of War,” was captured in March of 2008 in Thailand in a sting that involved U.S. agents posing as Colombian guerrillas. Bout had long been known as one of the most brazen arms traffickers to some of the worlds bloodiest conflicts–in Angola and Liberia, Afghanistan and Columbia, and many others. He had been blacklisted by the United States Treasury Department and singled out by the United Nations. (I have also reported on a major embarrassment that tied Bout to the Bush Administration: companies tied to Bout did cargo shipping for the Pentagon in Iraq.)

But Thailand has so far refused to extradite Bout to the United States for trial. Even more alarming, the Russian government is seeking to bring Bout back to Moscow. For decades, Bout has also long been suspected of having friends in high places in Russia, which protected Bout long after he became an international fugitive. Peter Landesman, writing in the New York Times in 2003, summed up the situation well, after meeting an unidentified source in Moscow: