Russian President Vladimir Putin has granted Russian citizenship to famous whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Snowden fled the US in 2013 after exposing the scale of secret surveillance conducted by government's across the world.
While working for the National Security Agency (NSA) as a contractor he began to grow disillusioned and copied tens of thousands of classified documents before fleeing the country and releasing them to journalists.
The leaked documents showed surveillance operations conducted by NSA and the UK's answer to it, GCHQ .
Using a secret court order the NSA had forced telecommunications giant Verizon to hand over its telephone data on an "ongoing daily basis".
The leak also showed GCHQ had tapped into the fibre-optic cables that carry global communications and sharing vast amounts of data with their American counterparts.
Snowden was given asylum in Russia but U.S. authorities have for years wanted him returned to the United States to face a criminal trial on espionage charges.
Now his name appeared without any Kremlin comment on a list of 72 foreign-born individuals to whom Putin was granting citizenship. Snowden has not reacted publicly either.
In 2020, Russia granted Snowden permanent residency rights, paving the way for him to obtain Russian citizenship.
That year a U.S. appeals court found the program Snowden had exposed was unlawful and that the U.S. intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth.
Putin, a former Russian spy chief, said in 2017 that Snowden, who keeps a low profile while living in Russia, was wrong to leak U.S. secrets but was not a traitor.
This comes as Putin contends with unrest as ordinary Russians resist being drafted to go fight in Ukraine.
