Russia grants Snowden a 1-year temporary refugee status (updated)
that Mr. Snowden is allowed to roam free is another twist of the knife.”
Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) two weeks ago said the United States should consider boycotting the upcoming Winter Games, to be held in Sochi, Russia, in February 2014, if Russia grants Snowden asylum.
“I love the Olympics, but I hate what the Russian government is doing throughout the world,” Graham said. “If they give asylum to a person who I believe has committed treason against the United States, that’s taking it to a new level.”
Secretary of State John Kerry said in June that Russia was defying international convention by allowing the fugitive to remain unhindered in the transit zone.
“There are standards of behavior between sovereign nations,” Kerry said. “There is common law. There is respect for rule of law.”
The White House has last week signaled that President Obama may cancel a planned summit meeting in Moscow in September.
Yesterday, the reaction from the White House was harsh. In a news briefing dominated by questions about Snowden, press secretary Jay Carney said the administration is “extremely disappointed that the Russian government would take this step” despite “ample legal justification” for returning Snowden to the United States.
“This move by the Russian government undermines a long-standing record of law enforcement cooperation” that had “recently been on the upswing” since the Boston Marathon bombings in April, he said.
Carney stressed that the White House’s view is that Snowden “is not a dissident,” or a whistleblower, but a suspect in a criminal case with serious national-security implications. He noted that Snowden “has been . . . in possession of classified information in China and in Russia,” which is “both a huge risk and a violation” of U.S. law.
Asked whether Obama would attend the September summit in Moscow, Carney said, “Obviously this is not a positive development . . . and we are evaluating the utility of the summit.”
Russian officials tried to minimize the importance of the case, saying ties between Russia and the United States would not suffer because of the “relatively insignificant” Snowden case.
Kucherena also said that yesterday’s Guardianstory revealing a top secret National Security Agency (NSA) program allowing analysts to search with no prior authorization through databases containing e-mails, online chats, and the browsing histories of millions of individuals was based on documents given to the Guardian before Snowden agreed to stop leaking, a key condition of his asylum offer from Russia.
Vladimir Putin had previously said he would be welcome only if he stopped “his work aimed at bringing harm” to the United States – “as strange as that sounds coming from my mouth.”
The Washington Post notes that, indeed, one of the few bright spots for U.S. officials was that Snowden’s behavior — including his ability to release additional secrets – will be tightly controlled by his new hosts, in contrast with the freedoms he may have had in one of the Latin American countries that offered him asylum, former U.S. officials and Russia experts said.
“He will likely live under very restricted conditions with a lot of surveillance,” said Andrew Kuchins, director of the Russian and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. “If he steps out of line, Putin will crush him like a bug.”
