Asylum Options Narrow Further for Snowden
MOSCOW — Asylum options appeared to narrow further on Tuesday for Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor on the run from American authorities, as at least eight countries reacted unfavorably to his requests for sanctuary and the Kremlin said he had withdrawn his application to Russia.
Only Venezuela and Bolivia appeared to offer him a hint of hope for a way out of his limbo inside the international airport transit lounge at Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow, where he has been ensconced out of public view for nine days.
President NicolÁs Maduro of Venezuela, visiting Russia, said that while he had not yet received an application from Mr. Snowden and would not use his plane to ferry Mr. Snowden home with him, he held out the possibility that Venezuela might ultimately agree to shelter Mr. Snowden.
Speaking to legislators and reporters at the Russian Parliament, Mr. Maduro said that Mr. Snowden deserved protection under international law.
“He did not kill anyone and he did not plant a bomb,” Mr. Maduro said, according to Russian news services. “He only said a big truth to prevent wars.”
The president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, signaled that Mr. Snowden would be welcome there as well.
But Austria, Finland, Ireland, Norway and Spain all said that requests for asylum must be made in person on their territories and therefore Mr. Snowden had not properly submitted an application, though only Austria acknowledged receiving a request from him. India and Brazil said they had rejected Mr. Snowden’s request outright. Poland said that it had received an application that was not properly submitted, but that it would have been rejected in any event.
Officials in Germany were noncommittal.
Mr. Snowden, 30, has been charged in the United States with violations of espionage laws for leaking classified information about the vast global surveillance operations of American intelligence agencies. WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy group that has been assisting Mr. Snowden, has described him as a whistle-blower who exposed American abuses of privacy. The Obama administration has described him as a hacker who should be extradited and prosecuted.
As an international oil and gas forum convened here on Monday, there had been speculation that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Mr. Maduro would use the opportunity to negotiate terms for Mr. Snowden to leave the Sheremetyevo transit area, his home since arriving from Hong Kong on June 23.
He had apparently intended to board a connecting flight headed for Latin America. In the interim, the United States announced that his American passport had been revoked, leaving him in a geopolitical limbo, stripped of any valid travel document and unable to leave the transit zone.
Russia enjoys warm ties with Venezuela, a major arms customer and energy partner, which sees the alliance as a way of countering the United States’ influence in Latin America.
The newspaper Izvestia speculated Monday that Mr. Maduro could spirit Mr. Snowden away on his presidential plane when he leaves Russia on Tuesday, arranging to take off from Sheremetyevo instead of a government facility at Vnukovo Airport. But at a news conference on Monday, Mr. Putin responded blankly to that theory.
“As to the possible departure of Mr. Snowden with some official delegation,” he said, “I know nothing.”
Even as Mr. Maduro seemed to hedge about Venezuela’s intentions, a spokesman for Mr. Putin, Dmitri S. Peskov, confirmed that Mr. Snowden on Monday had submitted asylum requests to other countries, but that he had rescinded his request for asylum in Russia.
“He has abandoned his intention and his request for the opportunity to remain in Russia,” Mr. Peskov said on a conference call with a small group of reporters in Moscow. At the same time, however, Mr. Peskov reiterated that Russia had no intention of extraditing Mr. Snowden to the United States, where the death penalty is a possibility for him if he is convicted.
On Monday, Kim N. Shevchenko, the Russian consul at Sheremetyevo Airport, said that Mr. Snowden’s traveling companion had hand-delivered an asylum request to the consular office in Terminal F of the airport, and that it had been passed on to the Foreign Ministry.
The request had threatened to deeply complicate Russia’s position in Mr. Snowden’s case, potentially making it impossible to maintain the mostly neutral position that Mr. Putin has sought to stake out since Mr. Snowden landed in Moscow.
The Russian Constitution gives the president direct authority over asylum requests.
At his news conference on Monday, Mr. Putin tried to thread the needle, saying Mr. Snowden was welcome to stay in Russia as long as he stopped publishing classified documents that hurt the United States’ interests. He went on to acknowledge that this was unlikely to happen.
President NicolÁs Maduro of Venezuela attended a wreath-laying ceremony on Tuesday in Moscow. Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated Press
“If he wants to go somewhere and they accept him, please, be my guest,” Mr. Putin said. “If he wants to stay here, there is one condition: He must cease his work aimed at inflicting damage to our American partners, as strange as it may sound from my lips.”
He added, “Because he sees himself as a human-rights activist and a freedom fighter for people’s rights, apparently he is not intending to cease this work. So he must choose for himself a country to go to, and where to move. When that will happen, I unfortunately don’t know.”
Mr. Putin’s comments reflected an increasingly sober view of the outcome if Mr. Snowden remains in Russia. For the second time, he took pains to say that Mr. Snowden had not been recruited by Russian intelligence — an impression that could corrode Mr. Snowden’s image as a truth-teller and drive away some supporters.
“He sees himself not as a former agent of a special service but as a fighter for human rights, a sort of a new dissident, someone similar to Sakharov, on a different scale, though,” Mr. Putin said. “But nevertheless, at his core he is a fighter for human rights, for democracy.” The reference was to the Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov.
While Mr. Snowden remains at Sheremetyevo, the United States has engaged an array of countries that have considered granting him asylum, making clear that doing so would carry big costs.
Ecuador, the country that is sheltering the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, has distanced itself, with top officials saying that they cannot consider Mr. Snowden’s asylum request unless he in Ecuador or one of its embassies and that Russia bore most responsibility for his fate.
Mr. Putin’s spokesman said as recently as Sunday that Mr. Snowden’s case “was not one on the Kremlin’s agenda,” noting that Sheremetyevo’s transit zone is legally not the part of territory of the Russian Federation.
“Snowden himself is in a pretty difficult situation,” said Dmitri V. Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center. “I think he was following Assange’s advice trying to get to Ecuador, but then Ecuador, and, indirectly, Cuba, have failed him. I think Venezuela is talking to the U.S. as well. The U.S. can offer things to Venezuela.”
Mr. Snowden’s application for asylum could make it difficult for the Kremlin to remain neutral, especially since the case has become a primary topic for public discussion in Russia over the last several days.
A parade of public figures — including human rights activists, pro-Kremlin figures, Communists, nationalists and parliamentarians — have made statements in favor of granting him asylum. As anchors read reports on Mr. Snowden’s case on a popular news program Monday night, a vivid blue-and-red backdrop read “Betray Snowden — Betray Freedom” and showed President Obama wearing headphones, a visual reference to the surveillance programs Mr. Snowden has revealed.
“To be honest, I can’t see any problem there,” Ivan Melnikov, one of the leaders of Russia’s Communist Party, told Interfax. “If the problem is hysterics from the United States, they ought to remember that, historically speaking, granting political asylum to figures like Snowden is normal historical practice, and there’s no reason for Russia to be embarrassed and drop out.”
At a round table on Monday, a prominent leader of United Russia, the main pro-Kremlin party, said Mr. Snowden “has done no less to win the Nobel Prize than Barack Obama.” Kirill Kabanov, a member of the presidential human rights council, described Mr. Snowden as a man who “tried to save the world.”
Sergei A. Markov, a pro-Kremlin analyst, said that if Mr. Snowden received asylum, he could acquire a Russian transit document and leave the country, or else remain in the country as a public figure, which he said would be “very good for public relations, he will be like GÉrard Depardieu.” Mr. Depardieu, the French actor, sought Russian citizenship to avoid taxes in his home country.
Mr. Markov said Russian leaders had spent several days weighing their options and taking a measure of domestic public opinion. The result, he said, was “more or less consensus over this issue.”
