At long last, Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport is no longer calling its siren song to journalists desperate for a glimpse of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Granted asylum in Russia for one year, Snowden rode off into the sunset, left the building on Thursday and was taken to an undisclosed location.
The Sheremetyevo chapter may be over, but the saga itself will continue. Already, there have been calls by US congressmen that Russia should be held accountable for granting Snowden asylum. There is also little doubt that US president Barack Obama will now cancel his planned trip to Moscow in September.
Pavel Durov, the eccentric Russian businessman and founder of Vkontakte, Russia's popular social network, has already offered Snowden a job. "I think it would be interesting for Snowden to work on protecting the personal information of our millions of users," Durov wrote on his VKontakte page.
Durov has long been famous for his curious stunts, the most controversial of which involved throwing money out of his office window in St Petersburg and blithely watching as passerby scrambled for it on the pavement below, so the job offer is not necessarily sincere. But the tone of it was sober as opposed to tongue-in-cheek.
Meanwhile, Anatoly Kucherena, a lawyer and member of the public chamber, said that Snowden had "figured out where he will live". Details about the location of his residence have not been revealed, due to fears for Snowden's safety.
It would be interesting to see if the United States' desire to punish Russia over granting Snowden asylum will feed into calls to boycott the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics over a controversial law that bans "propaganda of untraditional relations to minors" (ie "gay propaganda") – but these two events, the asylum decision and the adoption of this legislation, are not remotely the same.
With Snowden, the Kremlin did the moral thing – and the moral thing also happened to be the only thing the Kremlin could do in this instance. Essentially denied safe passage to Latin America, Snowden was marooned, and letting him languish in Sheremetyevo indefinitely would have dented the Kremlin's credibility at home and abroad.
In recent years, Moscow has excelled at snubbing Washington over anything it could, but the Snowden situation was different from the start. It prompted unusually cautious words from Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, who said that Snowden could remain in Russia provided he would do no more damage to the US government, which Putin referred to as the Russian government's partner.
Other prominent members of the government have pointed out that Russia was left with little choice in the matter. The head of the State Duma committee on international affairs, Alexei Pushkov, said: "Even though Obama said that he wouldn't ground a plane over some '29-year-old hacker', they trapped Snowden after they grounded the Bolivian president's plane."
"Any other decision would have meant that Russia would lose face," deputy Vyacheslav Nikonov told Kommersant. "If we didn't give Snowden asylum, no one would take us seriously – and the Americans would be the first to do this."
As a US citizen, I've spent the weeks that Snowden was stuck at Sheremetyevo talking with my Russian friends about why Snowden's revelations about the spying activities of the NSA were so important. It's one thing for all of us to talk about the proverbial death of privacy in the internet age – it's quite another to see powerful evidence of this fact. The death of privacy is a kind of joke to the members of my generation, people who have been online for most of their lives – but the revelations about the NSA have stopped the laughter.
I don't believe that Snowden did any significant damage to my government and its efforts to thwart terrorism – I believe my government damaged itself when it decided that some agencies could simply do as they pleased.
The damage Snowden did was largely symbolic. Washington is fond of scolding other nations over their human rights record (when it's politically expedient, of course – which is why we won't see anyone taking a tough line on Saudi Arabia any time soon), but in the current global climate of doubt and indecision, with growing turmoil in the Middle East, uncertainty over the future of Afghanistan, and continuing worries over the global economy, America's credibility abroad has been on the downswing of late.
Snowden appeared at the exact time that the US government needed to look at the top of its game on the international scene. This is why he won't be forgiven in a hurry.
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