President Vladimir Putin has conferred Russian citizenship on former United States Intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.
On Monday, Mr Snowden’s name appeared on a list of 72 foreign-born individuals for whom Mr Putin was granting citizenship that was posted on the Kremlin’s website.
U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price said he was unaware of any change to Snowden’s status as a U.S. citizen.
“I am familiar with the fact that he has in some ways denounced his American citizenship. I don’t know that he’s renounced it,” Mr Price said in a press briefing.
Mr Snowden’s lawyer Anatoliy Kucherena was quoted by Russian state-run news agencies as saying that his client has never served in the Russian army and would not be called up as part of a partial mobilisation announced by Mr Putin last week.
Mr Snowden’s citizenship conferment comes nine years after he exposed secret surveillance operations carried out by the National Security Agency (NSA) where he worked at the time.
Mr Snowden left the U.S. and was given asylum in Russia after leaking secret files in 2013 that revealed domestic and international surveillance operations carried out by the NSA.
Mr Snowden had been accused of espionage and theft of government property in the U.S. for leaking information on U.S. intelligence and mass surveillance programs to the media.
The materials leaked by Mr Snowden included secret documents from the Canadian, Australian and New Zealand signals intelligence agencies, who all shared information with the NSA through a shared database.
In 2020, Mr Snowden said that he and his then-pregnant wife Lindsay Mills applied for Russian citizenship so they would not be separated from their son in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and closed borders. Russia granted him permanent residency rights the same year, paving the way for him to obtain Russian citizenship.
