Putin provokes Biden, Russian citizenship in Snowden

Russian President Vladimir Putin granted citizenship to Edward Snowden, the Datagate mole who took refuge in Russia in 2013 after escaping from the United States for revealing the secrets of the US espionage system.

The move, with a strong symbolic and political value, is nothing more than a

that the strongman of the Kremlin has sent to the overseas enemy Joe Biden, while relations between Moscow and Washington are at an all-time low following the war in Ukraine .

"Nothing changes", was the dry and almost immediate reaction

of State Department spokesman Ned Price, who assured that American justice will continue to prosecute him for the dissemination of classified information, as he has been doing for years with Julian Assange. the founder of WikiLeaks now awaiting the decision of the British High Court for his extradition to the United States where he faces a sentence of 175 years in prison.

"Edward Joseph Snowden, born June 21, 1983 in the United States of America, is listed on the list of those who have received Russian citizenship," wrote the Russian agency Tass, citing a decree issued today by Putin.

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"After years of separation from our parents, my wife and I do not wish to be separated from our child," wrote Snowden, who had already obtained unlimited residence permit in Russia.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed to Ria Novosti news agency that citizenship was granted at the request of Snowden himself.

The informant's Russian lawyer, Anatoly Koutcherena, on his side revealed that Snowden would not have been touched by the mobilization order for the offensive in Ukraine, decreed by Putin last week for some categories of Russians to continue in ' invasion.

"He did not serve in the Russian army and therefore, according to our legislation, does not fall into this category of citizens who are now called," he explained.

According to the same source, Snowden's partner Lindsay Mills also applied for Russian citizenship, while their daughter already has it, having been born in Russia.

Former CIA technician

and until June 2013, a National Security Agency consultant, Snowden quit his job in the Hawaiian Islands.

He later recounted his disillusionment with him about the programs he had been involved in and that he tried to raise his ethical concerns through internal channels within the NSA, but that he had been ignored.

Then the flight to Hong Kong and the disclosure of the secrets that triggered the immediate American reaction: a complaint by US federal prosecutors with allegations of theft of government property, unauthorized disclosure of national defense information and voluntary disclosure of information secret to unauthorized persons.

Deprived of his American passport at Washington's request, the American NSA deep throat found himself in Moscow,

He thus became known to the general public for having publicly revealed thousands of classified documents

of the National Security Agency with stars and stripes and details of several top-secret mass surveillance programs as well as the US government as well as the British one.

The revelations appeared on the front pages of the Guardian and the Washington Post.

Among the various highly classified documents on the revealed intelligence programs, there is also that of telephone interception between the US and the European Union concerning communications metadata, the Prism, Tempora and Internet surveillance programs.