Snowden’s only safe choice may be to stay in Russia indefinitely
Russia, on the other hand, would seem to get around all three of these problems. The country is not a liberal democracy, or at least not widely viewed as such, meaning Moscow would risk little international credibility by defying a U.S. extradition request. It’s big enough that it doesn’t need to worry too much about upsetting the United States, which it clearly doesn’t, and is economically mostly tied to neighboring European and Asian states anyway. But Russia is also geopolitically weak enough that, unlike in the Soviet era when it was a true global power that negotiated frequently with its rivals, Moscow doesn’t have lots of crucial ongoing deals with the Americans. The biggest ones, cooperation on terrorism and Syria, are mostly stalled anyway.
Maybe most important, though, is Russia’s long history of sheltering Western fugitives, unbroken even by the fall of the Soviet Union and complete transformation of the Russian government. Deposed heads of state, shunned by most of the world, get luxurious homes in the upscale town of Barvikha, a little Paris custom-built for high-profile exiles. British intelligence officials who were caught spying for the Soviets and fled there half a century ago are still under Moscow’s protection; George Blake, now 91 years old, is still living on a Soviet KGB officer’s pension, though neither the KGB nor the Soviet Union have existed in 20 years. Neither Mikhail Gorbachev, who pulled the Soviet system down from the inside, nor Boris Yeltsin, who fostered warm ties with the West, gave up the old British spies. If Blake can spend several comfortable decades in Russia even after the fall of the Berlin Wall and Russia improving ties with the United Kingdom, then Snowden should be just fine.
Why does Russia do it? The New Republic’s Julia Ioffe called Russia a “geopolitical racketeer” that often looks for a way to profit from some international incident. The Guardian’s Andrew Rykin wrote that Russia loves to “photobomb” American foreign policy, finding low-risk but high-publicity opportunities to assert its significance, a strategy that allows it to maintain its self-image as a superpower rival without actually flexing superpower-level muscle.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/06/27/snowdens-only-safe-choice-may-be-to-stay-in-russia-indefinitely/
