MOSCOW: Russia would consider granting asylum to the American who has exposed top-secret US surveillance programmes, if he were to ask for it, President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman said yesterday.
Spokesman Dmitry Peskov stopped short of saying Moscow would accept Edward Snowden, but pro-Kremlin lawmakers spoke out in favour of the idea, tapping into a lingering Cold War rivalry with the United States and a vein of anti-American sentiment Putin has often encouraged.
“Promising Snowden asylum, Moscow takes upon itself the defence of people persecuted for political reasons,” Alexei Pushkov, chairman of the international affairs committee in the Lower House of parliament, said on Twitter.
“There will be hysteria in the United States. They recognise this as their right alone,” he said.
Putin and other Russian officials have often accused the United States of hypocrisy, saying it tries to impose standards of human rights, freedom and democracy on other nations while falling far short of them itself.
“This is an ideological catastrophe for the United States,” Pushkov said, referring to Snowden’s leaks about National Security Agency surveillance programmes.
Snowden, who provided the information for reports that revealed broad monitoring of phone call and Internet data by the NSA, fled to Hong Kong and has said he hopes that Iceland might grant him asylum.
Putin said the methods revealed by Snowden were widespread and were justified “in the circumstances of the struggle against international terrorism”, but that they must be applied legally and not behind the public’s back.
REUTERS
