The Kremlin said Monday that it won’t intervene in the case of former U.S. government contractor Edward Snowden and that Russia had no advance knowledge of his arrival from Hong Kong on Sunday.
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Reuters
A picture of Edward Snowden on a Chinese news website in Beijing.
President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that a decision about holding Mr. Snowden and sending him back to the U.S. to face charges wasn’t a matter for the Kremlin.
“It is not a question for us,” Mr. Peskov told The Wall Street Journal. “We don’t know what his plans are and we were unaware he was coming here.”
Russian state media, citing an official in the government’s security apparatus, said authorities have no legal grounds to detain and send Mr. Snowden back to the U.S.
Russia says it has no authority to expel Snowden; Kerry: ‘deeply troubling’
By Kathy Lally, Anthony Faiola and Jia Lynn Yang, Updated: Monday, June 24, 6:55 AM E-mail the writers
MOSCOW — Despite a direct request from the United States to return Edward Snowden to U.S. soil to face charges of leaking government secrets, Russian officials said Monday that they had no legal authority to detain the fugitive former government contractor, who arrived in Moscow on Sunday and was seeking asylum in Ecuador, reportedly by way of Havana.
News services said Snowden was expected to board an Aeroflot flight to Havana, scheduled to depart Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport at 6:05 a.m. Eastern time Monday. But reporters on board the flight said on Twitter that he had not been spotted among the passengers.
“They’ve just locked the doors of the plane, #Snowden is NOT on this plane!!!” tweeted Egor Piskunov, a reporter with Russia’s government-financed RT. It was still possible, however, that Snowden was on board but out of sight of the journalists, or wearing a disguise.
Vladimir Lukin, Russia’s human rights ombudsman and a former ambassador to the United States, told the Interfax news agency that Russia had no authority to expel Snowden, as Washington was asking it to do. Russian officials said travelers who never leave a secure transit zone inside an airport -—which means not crossing passport control—are not officially on Russian soil. Snowden did not have a Russia visa, several officials said, and therefore could not leave the transit zone.
In addition, Russia and the United States do not have an extradition treaty.
“The Americans can’t demand anything,” Lukin said, referring to the international saga dismissively. “Detective stories are good bedtime reading.”