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Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

> He can "travel abroad".

Some non-Russians who visit Russia need an exit visa. http://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/exit-visa.asp

------ My original post was getting heavily downvoted, even after the first edit. Here it is, with the first edit. I've ROT13d it to stop people down-voting the (now corrected) mistake.

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  No, Russians don't require a permission to leave the country.
  You are just babbling some made-up factoids.

  Sincerely,
  A Russian citizen

It used to be like that for all citizens. But that practice has been abolished quite a while ago, if you have a valid passport and you're not on a list of 'persons of interest' you can leave the country like everywhere else.

But you are right in Snowdens case, since foreigners resident in Russia need an 'exit visum' to be allowed to do trips abroad, and clearly Snowden is one of those.

Snowden is not a citizen.

I never claimed he was a citizen, but he is a resident and that's the bit that matters here. And that's exactly the situation that part of the law applies to (and it is one of the reasons I never wanted to live in Russia, I don't want to have to ask permission to leave a country).

So Snowden needs permission to be allowed to leave.

DanBC said "citizen", not you.

And I have since edited to correct my mistake.

That is incorrect. The only thing you have to have is foreign passport, as everywhere else.

The only exception if you work for government and have some sort of security clearance.

just in case someone misunderstands your post: in Russia, passport for international travel is called "foreign" passport to disambiguate it from the internal ID, which is also called "passport".

"Russia is one of these countries." Not true.

Possibly it refers to him being allowed to _return_ to Russia if he travels abroad.

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