MOSCOW — Edward Snowden has applied for political asylum in Russia, officials said Monday, and President Vladimir Putin offered assurance that Moscow would never turn the former National Security Agency contractor over to American justice — at least, not without something in return.
As reverberations from Snowden’s disclosures of NSA surveillance continued to echo internationally, Putin offered a head-spinning series of comments about the American fugitive, who apparently has spent more than a week confined to the transit area of Moscow’s international airport, trying to figure out where he can go without facing extradition to the United States.
“If he wants to go somewhere and somebody will host him — no problem,” Putin said at a news conference in Moscow. “If he wants to stay here, there is one condition: He must stop his work aimed at harming our American partners.”
While American intelligence officials might look skeptically on Putin’s sudden interest in their well-being, the Russian president went on to say that Snowden appears to have no intention of stopping his leaks of U.S. secrets. “So he must choose for himself a country to stay in and move there,” he said. “Unfortunately, I don’t know when this will happen. If I knew, I would tell you now.”
Snowden met at the airport Monday morning with Russian consular officials and handed them an appeal to 15 countries for political asylum, according to a Russian Foreign Ministry official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment. The official didn’t name the countries, but Kim Shevchenko, a Russian consular official at Sheremetyevo airport, told the Interfax news agency that Snowden had applied for asylum in Russia.
Igor Korotchenko, editor-in-chief of the monthly National Defense journal, said Putin was, in effect, offering a peace deal to the United States.
“Putin publicly pledged that if Snowden stays in Russia, the Kremlin will do its best to prevent any public exposures in the Russian mass media of the CIA’s and NSA’s secret activities,” Korotchenko said.