MOSCOW: The National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden will have to stop leaking US secrets if he wants to get asylum in Russia, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said on Monday.
“There is one condition if he wants to remain here: he must stop his work aimed at damaging our American partners. As odd as it may sound from me,” Putin told a news conference on Monday in Moscow.
However, Russia is not going to extradite Snowden, the president underlined.
“Russia has never extradited anyone and is not going to do so. Same as no one has ever been extradited to Russia,” Putin stated.
“At best,” he noted, Russia exchanged its foreign intelligence employees detained abroad for “those who were detained, arrested and sentenced by a court in the Russian Federation.”
Snowden “is not a Russian agent”, the president said, repeating that Russian intelligence services were not working with the fugitive American.
He said Snowden should choose his final destination and go there.
The former CIA employee Snowden, who is behind the biggest leak in the NSA, has been stuck in the transit zone of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport for over a week now, after he arrived in the Russian capital from Hong Kong.
The US annulled the whistleblower’s American passport and he presently has no other documents with which he can travel.
