Twinkle Little Star Putin Blinked Over Snowden

Putin's  foreign policy centers these days on a refusal to be a U.S. vassal state, or even a cooperative partner. He has picked fights over U.S. adoptions of Russian children, over Russian rights groups funded by the U.S., gay rights and adoptions and over geopolitical issues such as the civil war in Syria. At home, he has cast himself as a bulwark against U.S. influence, the only leader in the world who can truly stand up to Washington. But when it came this week to a direct confrontation with his “American partners” – as Snowden’s asylum would no doubt have caused – he backed away.

He must have known that Snowden would not accept his precondition. On Saturday, two days before Putin announced the asylum deal, the German magazine Der Spiegel published another of Snowden’s leaks, this one detailing how the U.S. spied on its European allies. Julian Assange, the founder of the whistle-blowing organization Wikileaks, said the following day that the leaks would continue. “There is no stopping the publishing process at this stage,” Assange told ABC News. The day after that, Wikileaks released a statement it ascribed to Snowden, who was apparently determined to keep his revelations coming. “The Obama administration is afraid of you,” the statement said. “It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised – and it should be. I am unbowed in my convictions.” 

But Putin’s convictions have proven a lot more malleable, and in effect, the Snowden affair has called his anti-American bluff. It has shown that his venom toward Washington is the act of a paper tiger, drawing political capital from the antagonisms of the Cold War. But he does not actually want to revive those antagonisms, certainly not for the sake of protecting a U.S. fugitive. At least in part, that is because Putin does not share the values that fugitive extols.

In the past few days, phrases like “human rights” and “democratic values” have issued from unlikely lips in Moscow, and they have sounded hollow to the point of comedy. Meeting on Monday during a session of the Public Chamber, an advisory body to the Kremlin, some of the diehards of the Russian establishment morphed into a Snowden pep squad, waxing self-righteous all of a sudden about transparency and freedom of speech. Listening to their defense of Snowden’s actions felt like watching bankers from a drum circle at an Occupy Wall Street event, perhaps the prospect of such company encouraged Snowden to take his chances at the airport.

As long as he stays there, cornered in the transit zone, Putin will also have no good options. As the daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta pointed out in a biting editorial on Tuesday, even granting him asylum unconditionally would not offer Putin much of an upside at this point. It would not be taken as a principled step, because Russia has never truly defended Snowden’s principles. “The only thing Russia has consistently defended on the world stage is its own sovereignty,” the paper wrote. “The principle of non-interference in its own affairs.” By that principle, it cannot bend to the U.S. demands to extradite Snowden. But neither, apparently, can it take the principled step of granting him asylum. Morally, then, Russia is stuck in a kind of limbo, somewhat like the legal limbo of Snowden’s life in the transit zone – neither here nor there. 

Photo: wikipedia

Source: TIME