Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer freed in the swap for Brittney Griner, said after returning home that his fellow Illinois inmates were “sympathetically inclined” towards Russia.

Then he echoed the Kremlin line that America was trying to “destroy us again”.

Bout spoke in an interview on Friday for Russian state television with Maria Butina, the Russian MP who herself once served a little over a year in US prisons.

Butina, who became a minor celebrity in Russia after her conviction in the US for operating as an unregistered foreign agent, called Bout “a small person in big geopolitics”.

The interview was a sign that Bout, too, could take on high-profile status within Russia after returning home — in his case, 14 years after his arrest.

Russian state television covered his late-night arrival at a Moscow airport, with a reporter saying he welcomed Bout along with “all of us who offered words of support”.

“The West thinks that they didn’t finish us off in 1990, when the Soviet Union started to collapse,” Bout told Butina.