Obama calls off meeting with Putin
US President Barack Obama cancels scheduled meeting with Russia's Vladimir Putin in the wake of Russia's decision to grant asylum to intelligence leaker Edward Snowden.
Barack Obama has called off plans to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin next month, as the fall-out continues over Moscow's decision to grant asylum to NSA whistleblower and fugitive Edward Snowden
The White House says the US president still plans to attend the Group of 20 economic summit in St Petersburg, Russia, but has no plans to meet Putin there one-on-one.
The announcement seemed to be contrary to the earlier news that the US Secretary of State John Kerry and Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel will hold talks with Russia's defence and foreign ministers in Washington despite the Snowden decision.
The former computer analyst who revealed widespread surveillance by the US finally left Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport after being granted temporary asylum by Russia after more than five weeks of being holed-up in the transit area due to the threat of deportation to America.
Snowden agreed to Russian President Vladimir Putin's request to stop leaking documents which could further embarrass US authorities.
Russia's rejection of pleas to hand Mr Snowden over and the decision to grant him a year's asylum prompted US President Barack Obama to rethink whether to hold a summit with Putin next month in Moscow. The decision also threatened to disrupt this week's high-level talks between the Cold War rivals.
"We have raised Mr Snowden with Russian officials many times in recent weeks. We expect to do so again," State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters.
"We would like to see Mr Snowden return to the United States. I don't know technically what that requires, but we know they have the capability to do that."
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov criticised US officials for threatening to pull out the talks between the two countries.
Ryabkov said Russia did not understand why the situation with Snowden was "being so blown out of proportion in the United States."
Obama and Putin last met in June, on the sidelines of the G8 summit in Northern Ireland.
Snowden, an American former National Security Agency (NSA) technical contractor and CIA worker, in June leaked to the Guardian and Washington Post newspapers documents and details relating to NSA programmes that gather data on telephone calls and emails.
Snowden, 30, fled his home in Hawaii, where he worked at a small NSA installation, to Hong Kong, and subsequently to Russia. He faces espionage charges in the US.
He spent about a month in a transit area of the Moscow airport as the US pressured other countries to deny him asylum. On 1 August, he left the airport after the Russian government said it would give him asylum there for a year.
