Russia has ignored the U.S.’s requests to deny Edward Snowden asylum, prompting Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to say Russian President Vladimir Putin is acting “like a schoolyard bully.”
“In my experience, I’ve learned unless you stand up to that bully, they ask for more and more and more,” said Schumer (left) on CBS’s Face the Nation, according to Reuters.
Relations between the countries’ governments are “more poisonous than at any time since the Cold War,” Schumer said. He urged the President to move the Group of 20 summit, set to take place in St. Petersburg in September, to another location.
Snowden (right) was recently granted temporary asylum in Russia after living in the transit zone of the Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow for more than a month, according to RIA Novosti.
“He's always going out of his way, President Putin is, to seem to poke us in the eye, whether it's in Iran, Syria, now with Snowden – so I would urge the president not to go forward with the bilateral meeting next month,” Schumer said. “That would give Putin the kind of respect he doesn't deserve at this point in time.”
Putin does not want to extradite Snowden to the U.S. where the NSA-leaker could face the death penalty, despite assurances from U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder that the government would not seek a death penalty for Snowden.
Holder said the crimes Snowden is currently charged with do not warrant the death penalty, and if in the future he is charged with any crime that merits the death penalty, the government would not seek it as his sentence.
Images: Twitter, WikiCommons
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