So: The “Merchant of Death” is back to selling arms to the world’s worst, just two years after getting sprung from a US prison in the Biden-Harris deal with Vladimir Putin to get WNBA star Brittney Griner released from a Russian internment camp.

So much for the dealmakers’ promises that Viktor Bout wouldn’t go back to his deadly work: It’s pretty clear that his “independent” sales largely served Putin’s agenda (with just enough deniability), which is why Vlad traded to get him back.

And now The Wall Street Journal reports that he’s just closed a $10 million deal to provide automatic weapons, including AK-47 rifles, to the Houthis — with a potential sale of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles next up.

This, as the Yemen-based terror group has largely closed the Red Sea to commercial shipping by shooting at vessels there (with a clear exception for Chinese-flagged ones).

And as they attack Israel and US forces in the region, too: Devil’s work that Bout’s work plainly enables.

We slammed the Bout deal when Biden and Harris closed it: Not because it was wrong to work for Griner’s release after her kangeroo-court conviction, but because the White House should have gotten more than a single American back if was going to release an international war criminal who at one point was the world’s second-most-wanted after Osama bin Laden.

Letting Putin so readily win so big in these deals is a huge incentive for him to keep taking de facto hostages (always on trumped-up criminal charges).

Washington can’t sit by passively, waiting for Vlad to demand the release of more monsters in exchange for his innocent captives: A good start would be finding, and freezing, the western accounts where the Russian tyrant has stashed some of his ill-gotten billions.