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Putin Rules Out Extradition for Snowden in Russia Airport
With Snowden in Middle, U.S. And Russia Joust, and Cool Off
(about 5 hours later)
MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia confirmed directly for the first time on Tuesday that Edward J. Snowden, the fugitive former American national security contractor, was staying temporarily in an international transit area at a Moscow airport, and Mr. Putin appeared to rule out American requests for his extradition to the United States.
MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Tuesday appeared to rule out sending Edward J. Snowden back to the United States to face espionage charges, leaving him in limbo even as Moscow and Washington seemed to be making an effort to prevent a cold-war-style standoff from escalating.
Speaking at a news conference while on an official visit to Finland, Mr. Putin offered no new information on where Mr. Snowden might be headed from the transit area of Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow, where he has been ensconced, out of public view, for the past two days. But he said Mr. Snowden had broken no Russian laws.
In his first public comments on the case, Mr. Putin said that Mr. Snowden — the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked documents about American surveillance programs — had committed no crime on Russian soil and was “a free man” who could choose his own destination. “We can only extradite some foreign nationals to the countries with which we have the relevant international agreements on extradition,” he added. “With the United States, we have no such agreement.”
“Mr. Snowden is a free man,” Mr. Putin said, “and the sooner he chooses his final destination, the better it will be both for us and for him.”
But even as American officials remained angry at China for letting Mr. Snowden fly to Moscow, they and their Russian counterparts toned down the red-hot language that threatened a deeper rupture in relations. Mr. Putin said he saw little to gain in the conflict. “It’s like shearing a piglet,” he said. “There’s a lot of squealing and very little wool.” Some American officials interpreted the comment as a positive signal and speculated that Mr. Snowden would be sent to another country that could turn him over.
Mr. Putin also said Mr. Snowden's arrival "was a complete surprise for us" and that as a transit passenger, “he doesn’t need a visa or other documents. As a transit passenger, he has a right to buy a ticket and fly wherever he wants.”
Yet the Russian president’s remarks during an official visit to Finland also underscored what may be the lasting damage the case has caused for American relations with both Moscow and Beijing. In noting that Mr. Snowden viewed himself as a “human rights activist” who “struggles for freedom of information,” Mr. Putin made clear that it would be harder for President Obama to claim the moral high ground when he presses foreign leaders to stop repressing dissenters and halt cyberattacks.
He sought to refute suggestions that Russian security officials might be talking to Mr. Snowden, who is believed to be carrying a trove of American intelligence data on laptop computers and thumb drives. Mr. Putin said they “have never worked with Mr. Snowden and are not working with him now.”
In the days since Mr. Snowden fled Hong Kong for Moscow, the Russians and the Chinese have seized both on his revelations about surveillance and the fact that the United States is seeking his arrest to make the case for a you-do-it-too argument. Igor Morozov, a Russian lawmaker, wrote that the case exposed an American “policy of double standards.” Xinhua, the state-owned Chinese news agency, editorialized that “the United States, which has long been trying to play innocent as a victim of cyberattacks, has turned out to be the biggest villain in our age.”
The remarks by Mr. Putin were the most definitive and extensive from the Russian government on Mr. Snowden, whose successful effort, so far, to elude his American pursuers has captivated global attention, showed the limits of American power and strained American relations with both Russia and China. Mr. Snowden flew to Moscow on Sunday from Hong Kong despite an American request that the authorities there arrest him.
American officials said such arguments were false equivalences, saying that there was no comparison between congressionally sanctioned and court-monitored surveillance programs, or the prosecution of Mr. Snowden, and the actions taken by the governments in Moscow and Beijing. But it is an argument that Washington may find difficult to sell in some parts of the world, even among some American allies, and it is fueling criticism inside the United States.
Mr. Putin said American accusations that Russia was abetting a fugitive “are just a nightmare and nonsense,” and he appeared to end any possibility that Russia would extradite Mr. Snowden.
“The Russians for the better part of a decade have always tried to argue that the U.S. has double standards,” said Andrew Weiss, a former Russia adviser to President Bill Clinton and now vice president at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “In the Russian domestic context and international context they never get tired of looking for those kinds of axes.”
“We can extradite foreign nationals only to those countries with which we have relevant international agreements on the extradition of criminals,” Mr. Putin said. “We have no such agreement with the United States.”
The arguments could complicate American initiatives with both countries. Chinese officials are now ramping up the critique ahead of the United States-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, which starts in Washington in early July with the arrival of an array of Chinese leaders. On the top of the agenda, at Mr. Obama’s insistence, is talk about how to work out rules of the road for behavior involving computers and online.
While in Russian territory, Mr. Putin said, “Mr. Snowden, thank God, has not committed any crimes.”
Until lately, the United States seemed to have Beijing on the defensive, with evidence that Chinese military units were behind recent computer attacks. Then Mr. Snowden told a Hong Kong newspaper that the United States had been engaged in a vigorous hacking campaign in China.
Mr. Putin spoke hours after the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, chastised the United States for its demands regarding Mr. Snowden, who has been charged with violating American espionage laws by revealing secret information on intelligence-gathering. He and his allies describe him as a whistle-blower whose revelations have exposed what they called the United States government’s invasion of privacy around the world.
Mr. Obama has insisted that there is a difference between common espionage and China’s behavior. “Every country in the world, large and small, engages in intelligence gathering,” he told Charlie Rose in an interview on PBS. But intelligence gathering is different from “a hacker directly connected with the Chinese government or the Chinese military breaking into Apple’s software systems to see if they can obtain the designs for the latest Apple product,” he said.
Mr. Lavrov said Mr. Snowden had not crossed the Russian border, which appeared at first to be a denial that he was in Russia. But it also was a technical way of saying Mr. Snowden was in the international passenger transit area, a restricted zone where foreign travelers do not get their passports stamped and do not pass through immigration checkpoints as they await flight connections to other countries.
“That’s theft,” the president added, “and we can’t tolerate that.”
American officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry, lashed out with unusual force on Monday against China for allowing Mr. Snowden to leave Hong Kong, against Russia for permitting him safe transit and against Ecuador for declaring that it is actively considering Mr. Snowden’s request for political asylum. The Americans have demanded that he be seized and repatriated.
China does not acknowledge the theft, or buy Mr. Obama’s argument. “The timing couldn’t be worse for Obama,” one senior Asian diplomat said. “I know he draws distinctions between stealing intellectual property and spying, but for most people that difference is not significant.”
“He didn’t cross the Russian border, and we consider the attempts we are seeing to accuse the Russian side of violating United States law as completely ungrounded and unacceptable, or nearly a conspiracy accompanied by threats against us,” Mr. Lavrov said, speaking to reporters here after a meeting with the Algerian foreign minister. He added, “There are no legal grounds for this kind of behavior from American officials toward us.”
The timing is also bad with Russia, which Mr. Obama is depending on to help resolve the war in Syria. When Secretary of State John Kerry criticized Russia on Monday as a repressive country, he personally offended Mr. Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov. On Tuesday, Mr. Lavrov lashed out at the United States, saying, “There are no legal grounds for this kind of behavior from American officials toward us.”
Later in the day Mr. Kerry, speaking to reporters while visiting Saudi Arabia, sought to tone down the angry exchange of words with his Russian counterpart, with whom he has sought to cultivate a good relationship. “We are not looking for a confrontation,” Mr. Kerry said.
Within hours, though, the two sides appeared to pull back. Mr. Kerry told reporters traveling with him in Saudi Arabia that the United States was “not looking for a confrontation.” And American and Russian officials meeting in Geneva on Tuesday scheduled a session next week between Mr. Kerry and Mr. Lavrov to discuss Syria.
The comments by Mr. Putin and Mr. Lavrov were the first by top Russian officials about Mr. Snowden since Mr. Snowden’s reported arrival at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow on Sunday. Employees of Aeroflot, the Russian airline, said Mr. Snowden had been booked on an afternoon flight Monday to Havana, but he did not board and the aircraft left without him.
Mr. Putin, who is scheduled to host Mr. Obama in St. Petersburg and Moscow in September, said he hoped the Snowden case would “not affect in any way the businesslike character of our relations with the United States.”
Ecuador confirmed that it had received an asylum request and had provided documents allowing Mr. Snowden to travel there. Mr. Snowden’s American passport has been revoked.
But the case may be drawing Russia and China closer together, and Beijing’s action may influence Moscow’s decision. The two governments have consulted on the case, with the Chinese explaining why it allowed Mr. Snowden to leave Hong Kong even though the United States had revoked his passport and requested his arrest, said Dmitri K. Simes, president of the Center for the National Interest in Washington.
Russian officials on Monday said that they had no information about Mr. Snowden, which seemed unlikely at the time given that the Russian police took the unusual step of standing on the tarmac surrounding the plane that reportedly was supposed to take him to Cuba. Russian authorities also cordoned off the gate and had threatened to take telephones from journalists preparing to board the flight.
“These conversations clearly make it more difficult for Russia to appear weak by making a concession while Beijing stood its ground,” Mr. Simes said.
The sharp tone of comments by Mr. Kerry and other American officials was surprising, in part because there was no reason to believe that they could force Russia to cooperate and because it is highly unlikely that, if the roles were reversed, the United States would readily repatriate a Russian fugitive security official reportedly carrying computers filled with government secrets.
Aleksei K. Pushkov, chief of a parliamentary committee on foreign affairs said in a Twitter post early Wednesday that “the U.S. threats toward Russia and China over the Snowden affair will not give results, but only bring Moscow and Beijing together even more strongly. Unreasoned pressure.”
The United States and Russia, fierce rivals on intelligence matters dating to the cold war, have long shown an ability to maintain their broader bilateral relationship in the face of occasional disputes over espionage incidents, including the arrest last month in Moscow of an American Embassy employee accused of working as an operative for the Central Intelligence Agency. But Mr. Lavrov’s pointed remarks indicated that the diplomatic contretemps was taking a nasty turn.
The Obama administration was relying on Deputy Secretary of State William J. Burns, a low-key, respected former ambassador to Russia, to negotiate with Moscow. The administration argued Tuesday that even though the United States and Russia did not have an extradition treaty, Washington had regularly sent back Russians sought by Moscow. Over the last five years, the Department of Homeland Security said Tuesday, the United States had returned 1,700 Russian citizens, with more than 500 of them being “criminal deportations.”
On Monday, the United States accused Russia of ignoring the law in allowing Mr. Snowden to travel through the Moscow airport and sharply criticized Russia, China and Ecuador over their records on Internet freedom.
But in Moscow, Mr. Snowden was being compared to cold war dissidents. “I have never heard of any case when the United States would extradite someone’s fugitive spy,” said Vlacheslav Nikonov, a member of Parliament. “It just never happened. Why would they expect that would happen?”
Mr. Lavrov said on Tuesday, “We have no connection with Mr. Snowden, nor with his relation toward the American justice system, nor with his movement around the world. He chose his own route and we, like most of those here, found out about this from the press.”
As for the subject of all this attention, Mr. Snowden remained in the transit zone of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport. Mr. Putin said Russian intelligence agencies had not questioned him, although some independent analysts cast doubt on that assertion. “If I still worked there, I would talk to him,” said Aleksandr Kondaurov, a retired K.G.B. general.
The anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks, which says it has helped Mr. Snowden evade the American authorities, has said that he is safe and healthy but has declined to pinpoint his whereabouts. The White House has said it believes that Mr. Snowden is still in Moscow.
Mr. Snowden, who remained out of sight for another day, has requested asylum from Ecuador. There are no direct flights from Moscow to Quito, the Ecuadorean capital, so if he were to head there, he might travel through Havana. The next flight from Moscow to Havana is Thursday.
American officials also openly mocked China and Russia on Monday as states that repress free speech and transparency and therefore are hardly apt refuges for someone fighting government secrecy in the United States.
David
M. Herszenhorn and Ellen Barry reported from Moscow, and Peter Baker from Washington. Reporting was contributed by Andrew Roth in Moscow; David E. Sanger, Steven Lee Myers and Charlie Savage in Washington; and Michael R. Gordon in Jidda, Saudi Arabia.
“I wonder if Mr. Snowden chose China and Russia as assistants in his flight from justice because they’re such powerful bastions of Internet freedom,” Mr. Kerry said sarcastically during a stop in New Delhi.
President Obama’s press secretary, Jay Carney, said Mr. Snowden’s chosen destinations indicated “his true motive throughout has been to injure the national security of the United States.”
The strong words went beyond typical diplomatic language and underscored the growing ramifications of the case for the United States. The Obama administration’s inability, at least for now, to influence China, Russia and countries in Latin America that may accept Mr. Snowden for asylum, like Ecuador, brought home the limits of American power around the world.
Ecuador’s foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño, criticized the United States on Monday for its pursuit of Mr. Snowden. “The one who is denounced pursues the denouncer,” Mr. Patiño said at a news conference in Hanoi, Vietnam, a stop on a previously scheduled diplomatic visit to Asia. “The man who tries to provide light and transparency to issues that affect everyone is pursued by those who should be giving explanations about the denunciations that have been presented.”
Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa, wrote on his Twitter account, “We will analyze very responsibly the Snowden case and with absolute sovereignty will make the decision we consider the most appropriate.” The United States remains Ecuador’s leading trading partner, but Washington’s influence in Quito has been slight since Mr. Correa became president in 2007. He has repeatedly flouted and tweaked the United States, by, for example, stopping American antidrug flights out of a military base in Manta, and expelling the American ambassador in 2011 after WikiLeaks cables suggested she felt Mr. Correa had tolerated police corruption.
A range of American officials, including the deputy secretary of state and the F.B.I. director, spent Monday reaching out to their Russian counterparts seeking cooperation, without any apparent result. Mr. Snowden, who spent Sunday night in the transit zone of Sheremetyevo Airport, did not board the flight for Havana and he made no public appearance or statement.
American intelligence officials remained deeply concerned that Mr. Snowden could make public more documents disclosing details of the National Security Agency’s collection system or that his documents could be obtained by foreign intelligence services, with or without his cooperation.
Technical experts have been carrying out a forensic analysis of the trail he left in N.S.A. computer systems, trying to determine what he had access to as a systems administrator for Booz Allen Hamilton, a United States government contractor, and what he may have downloaded, officials said.
The South China Morning Post reported Monday night on its Web site that in an interview, Mr. Snowden said he had specifically sought the job at Booz Allen so he could collect information about the N.S.A.'s secret surveillance programs to release to news outlets.
Glenn Greenwald, a columnist for The Guardian, has said Mr. Snowden gave him thousands of documents, only a tiny fraction of which were published. Many may be of limited public interest, but they could be of great value to a foreign intelligence service, which could get a more complete idea of the security agency’s technical abilities and how to evade its net, officials said.
David M. Herszenhorn reported from Moscow, Peter Baker from Washington and Rick Gladstone from New York. Reporting was contributed by Ellen Barry and Andrew Roth from Moscow; Scott Shane, Steven Lee Myers and Charlie Savage from Washington; Michael R. Gordon from Jidda, Saudi Arabia; William Neuman from Quito, Ecuador; and Victoria Burnett from Havana.
