Putin grants citizenship to Edward Snowden, who disclosed U.S. surveillance

Russian President Vladimir Putin granted citizenship on Monday to Edward Snowden, the former security consultant who leaked information about top-secret U.S. surveillance programs and is still wanted by Washington on espionage charges.

Snowden, 39, was one of 72 foreigners granted citizenship in a decree signed by Putin.

Snowden, who considers himself a whistleblower, fled the United States to avoid prosecution and has been living in Russia, which granted him asylum in 2013.

Snowden was granted permanent residency in 2020, and his lawyers said at the time that he was applying to obtain a Russian passport without renouncing his U.S. citizenship.

Snowden’s revelations, published first in The Washington Post and the Guardian, were arguably the biggest security breach in U.S. history. The information he disclosed revealed top-secret NSA surveillance as part of a program known as PRISM and the extraction of a wide range of digital information.

Snowden and his lawyers did not immediately comment on the decree.

In 2017, Putin said in a documentary film made by U.S. director Oliver Stone that he did not consider Snowden “a traitor” for leaking government secrets.

“As an ex-KGB agent, you must have hated what Snowden did with every fiber of your being,” Stone says in the clip.

“Snowden is not a traitor,” Putin replied. “He did not betray the interests of his country. Nor did he transfer any information to any other country which would have been pernicious to his own country or to his own people. The only thing Snowden does, he does publicly.”