Does this protect him from extradition?
Lol of course it's not Russia that granted him citizenship, it was Putin personally. Can't have people thinking that there's a government outside of the one guy we put there.
I feel like the title was written this way to turn people even more against Snowden and other whistleblowers. Mass media has already implanted a pavlovian reaction to the word Putin in people, they hear the name and they think Big Evil Scheming Marvel Bad Guy who is ontologically evil. By phrasing the headline this way, they can frame it as "Actually, protecting witnesses to US crimes against humanity from retribution is what evil dictators do sweety".
Same energy as "THE CCP DID THIS"
Can never imagine there's a state backed by actual normal people. Must be a series of individual actors detached from outside contexts.
But also, Putin's crimes reflect on all Russians despite being a singular dictatorCan never imagine there’s a state backed by actual normal people.
To be fair, that is a difficult concept to imagine for someone who's always lived in a country run by deranged capitalists
I feel like the title was written this way to turn people even more against Snowden and other whistleblowers
Definitely.
Search for "Snowden" on Twitter and it's nearly 100% liberals wishing for his death. No joke.
There was always a vocal segment of liberals that hated Snowden for fleeing to Russia. Now they have more people agreeing on them because Putin is villain of the week.
to be extradited the Russians would have to arrest him and agree to send him over. America can't just demand countries extradict random people
Reminds me of the continued refusal to send over that one *US diplomat's wife for running over some kid *after pulling out in front of his motorcycle in the UK.
*was not exactly up to date on the specifics
Wait who’s refusing to send her to who? I’ve never heard of this case I’m interested
IIRC american diplomat's wife in UK, didn't look both ways before pulling out, killed a motorcyclist.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/world/europe/diplomatic-immunity-harry-dunn.html
I feel like it’s incredibly obvious that diplomatic immunity shouldn’t apply to traffic crimes and I don’t know why that isn’t built in
I can definitely see how that would be a problem, yeah. I do wonder though if that outweighs the problem of having a class of people who can run down pedestrians with few repercussions
Sometimes they can, sometimes they just blackbag people and do “extraordinary renditions” to black sites
and sometimes they can't do either. black bagging people is risky because if your guys get caught on the wrong side of the border they are going to be in trouble and also massively embaress America
yeah because it was over austrian airspace and Austria is part of the NATO goon squad.
Forcibly grounding the Bolivian presidents plane over Bolivia or Russia would have been another matter
Isn't Austria one of the few European countries that aren't in NATO?
You make it sound like the US would never do this. They do it literally every day
Right, they don’t do it from Russia or China specifically because those places have extensive counter-intelligence and will likely catch them
they don't have moral objections to it but the US isn't all powerful and don't always get their way
They are still extremely powerful, more powerful than anywhere else by far, and able to get their way quite often most places on Earth. Luckily for Snowden, Moscow is one of the few places out of their reach
This is the same joke that was posted on Reddit 6000 times and you should be above it
He hadn't served a conscription term, so he is not eligible for draft.
If I was him I wouldn't ever set foot outside of Russia or China and those two only on Russian/Chinese airlines as a US/western airline could be diverted to a European country for some made up emergency and then nab him off it when he expected no stops outside those two.
He'd also be safe in the DPRK but as he's not a communist I doubt he wants to visit there. Might be safe in a few other countries but honestly any neutral country that doesn't put deliberate effort into protecting him could see him just kidnapped into a private plane at a private airstrip as they want him pretty badly if for no other reason than to make an example out of him.
