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Comment by eyphka | Hacker News Reader

Snowdens recent conversations around Russia and Russia's invasion of Ukraine have tinted or confirmed biases against Snowden as a traitor and stooge of the Russian government.

See: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/12/18/the-trouble-wi...

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I read your link and don't get it. He said "Russia should not invade Ukraine" and pretty much nothing else. The criticism seems to be that he isn't more aggressively criticizing Russia? When he is physically located there, in a country that famously does not have any sort of freedom of speech, and has a wife and baby?

I believe the criticism usually stems from the following tweet and the silence after the invasion of Ukraine.

https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1493646431743356931

Thanks for the clarifying link. I still don't see the issue here... so he thought Russia was not about to invade Ukraine before it actually happened, but in fact he was very wrong? so?

He obviously had a negative opinion about the US government and very little trust for it, so he is quite biased, but that seems expected given his history. I don't read this as him somehow supporting the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Plus all he said was that the US gov provided insufficient evidence of their certainty that Russia was about to invade. I recall all the conservative media outlets at the time making fun of the man that gave the press release when a journalist asked him about evidence and he responded that the evidence was that he said that Russia was about to invade.

To be fair to him, the silence could fairly be interpreted as humility, particularly given the tweet with which he broke the silence:

https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1498049577131208705

https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1493641714363478016

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