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Russia on Thursday granted Edward Snowden temporary asylum and let the US whistleblower leave the Moscow airport where he had been staying for almost five weeks.
Snowden left Sheremetyevo airport for an undisclosed destination, his Russian lawyer Anataloy Kucherena said in televised comments at the airport.
He said that Russian authorities had granted Snowden temporary asylum for one year. TV footage showed Kucherena holding up a copy of a Russian refugee ID with Snowden’s photo, name, and an expiry date of July 31, 2014.
The lawyer explained that Snowden’s location would not be revealed because of safety concerns. “He is one of the world’s most-sought persons,” he said. Kucherena said Snowden had left the airport in a taxi.
The WikiLeaks anti-secrecy group confirmed the news. “Edward Snowden was granted temporary asylum in Russia for a year and has now left Moscow airport,” it said on Twitter.
The group added that Snowden was under the care of WikiLeaks activist Sarah Harrison, who is thought to have been with him since he left Hong Kong on a Moscow-bound flight on June 23.
Snowden had been “continuously monitored by WikiLeaks staff since his presence in Hong Kong,” the group said.
The United States wants Snowden sent home to face espionage charges linked to his revelations of wide-scale electronic surveillance programmes by US spy agencies. He had been unable to leave the airport because his US passport had been revoked.
Effects on US-Russia bilateral meet
The White House said the United States was “extremely disappointed” with Russia’s decision and said it could damage relations between the countries.
The move has forced reconsideration of US President Barack Obama’s plans to meet bilaterally with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow ahead of the Group of 20 summit in September, spokesman Jay Carney indicated.
“Obviously this is not a positive development. We are evaluating the utility of a summit,” he said, clarifying he meant the bilateral meeting, not the G20 itself.
When asked whether the G20 trip was also in danger, Carney said, “I have no changes in our travel plans to announce.” The Kremlin on Thursday downplayed damage from the affair to US-Russian ties.
“The case is a pretty insignificant issue,” Putin’s top foreign policy aide, Yuri Ushakov, was quoted as saying by Interfax. Ushakov added that there were no signals that Obama would cancel his visit.
The United States was also reevaluating whether to go forward with a so-called “two plus two” meeting between US and Russian ministers.
Obama and Putin had agreed in June to launch a regular dialogue between the foreign and defence ministers of the two nations. The first meeting had been expected to be held in August.
Marie Harf, State Department spokeswoman, said that the US was “reevaluating the utility” of the two-plus-two meeting.
Harf also said that Moscow had not informed Washington ahead of its decision to grant temporary asylum.
Carney said asylum for Snowden “undermines long-standing law enforcement cooperation” which had been on upswing after the Boston Marathon bombings. He said the US was “extremely disappointed that the Russian government would take this step despite our very clear and lawful requests in public and in private to have Mr Snowden expelled to the United States to face the charges against him.” The information about secret surveillance programmes released by Snowden has generated outrage among US lawmakers and international allies. A group of lawmakers met with Obama to discuss the programmes at the White House on Thursday.
Three senators introduced legislation that would rein in the programmes by changing the way judges are appointed to the secret court that approves the surveillance and by naming a special advocate to voice civil rights concerns to the body.
Snowden applied for asylum in Russia on July 2, after reportedly accepting Putin’s demand that he stop leaking US intelligence secrets. Putin has said Snowden would not be handed over to the United States.
Britain’s Guardian on Wednesday published fresh revelations from Snowden about another NSA computer programme, called XKeyscore, which it said allowed analysts to access the emails, online chats and browsing histories of millions of internet users without prior authorisation.
The programme was the NSA’s “widest-reaching” system for developing intelligence from the internet, the paper wrote, quoting NSA training material.
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