From Snowden, Putin gets a rare reprieve from unremitting opprobrium
What a difference a day makes for Russian president Vladimir Putin.
For the last 24 hours, he has been an international punching bag over the posthumous conviction of Sergei Magnitsky, an attorney-whistleblower who died in 2009 after a year of torture and denial of medical treatment in prison. To explain the Orwellian world of Putin, critics and analysts reached back to Stalin and even further—to the Cadaver Synod of 897, in which the corpse of Pope Formosus was put on the stand to face trial for conspiracy.
But today, the most famous fugitive on the planet—Edward Snowden—announced that he has officially sought temporary asylum in Russia. By seeking refuge in Russia, Snowden offers Putin a chance to peacock as a safe hand when it comes to those who claim to be politically misunderstood. That is a welcome gift since Putin—not to mention Russia and the Soviet Union before that—is more famous as a person whom the famous and the not-so fight to get away from.
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Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, says the government has not yet received the asylum request, and referred to a July 1 statement from the Russian president: “There is one condition if he wants to remain here,” Putin said at the time. “He must stop his work aimed at damaging our American partners.” Speaking today with a couple of human rights activists at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, Snowden responded, “No actions I take or plan are meant to harm the US. … I want the US to succeed.”
But there is more good news today on the PR front for Putin: The UK government has decided not to allow a public inquiry into one of the most notorious murders of the last decade—the grisly 2006 nuclear poisoning of KGB defector Alexander Litvinenko.
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http://qz.com/103634/from-edward-snowden-putin-gets-a-rare-reprieve-from-unremitting-opprobrium/