MOSCOW — A day after President Obama commuted the sentence of Chelsea Manning, the Russian government clarified Wednesday the fate of Edward J. Snowden, the other main source of secrets about US surveillance in recent years.
Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor who was granted asylum in Russia in 2013, will be allowed to remain in the country for “a couple more years,” Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry, said on Facebook.
Snowden and his supporters have been campaigning for a pardon from Obama, but the chances of clemency appear to be vanishingly small given that his name did not appear on a list of pardons Tuesday.
Snowden found himself stranded in Moscow four years ago after he was thwarted in his bid to fly to Latin America following the publication of articles in the Guardian and the Washington Post, based on information he provided, revealing extensive surveillance and data collection programs operated by the NSA.
In response to a question about why Snowden and Manning were being treated differently, Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said Tuesday that the documents leaked by the former NSA contractor were “far more serious and far more dangerous” than those that Manning had disclosed.
In an interview with the Guardian in September, Snowden argued that his revelations were not only morally right but that they also led to an overhaul of secrecy laws that benefited Americans.