The US whistleblower Edward Snowden has attacked his Russian protectors by criticising the Kremlin’s human rights record and suggesting its officials have been involved in hacking US security networks.
He also described the leak last month of top-secret National Security Agency espionage tools as an implicit threat to the US government, potentially by Russia.
On Saturday, Snowden said: “I can’t fix the human rights situation in Russia, and realistically my priority is to fix my own country first, because that’s the one to which I owe the greatest loyalty.
I think what he did is underestimated now, in a lot of ways, but I think will be looked back on with the magnitude it deserves.