JUST IN: Snowden heading towards Havana

Miriam Elder is at the airport in Moscow about to get on what we hope is the same plane to Havana as Edward Snowden. She told me:

As far as we know he’s expected to get on this flight to Havana in two hours, around 2pm Moscow time. There is speculation that maybe all this information that he’ll be on it is a ruse, but there’s a whole lot of journalists here taking the chance that he’ll be on that flight.

I asked her what the reaction had been in Russia to Snowden’s sudden arrival in Moscow yesterday.

It’s obviously been huge. It’s been a really big story. The airport has been crawling both with international journalists and Russian journalists … We haven’t had any really huge statements from Russian officials; Putin hasn’t commented on it. The foreign ministry, last I checked, just said they were looking into what his plans are.
And you’ve had a lot of Russian MPs calling for him to stay here and all I can say, being at the airport until 1am last night, is that there were Russian undercover agents all over the terminal where we believed him to be. It was really clear that the Russians were in charge of the situation here. There were Ecuadorian diplomats milling around trying to get to talk to him but the Russians seemed to be controlling everything here.

Miriam reiterated that there had been no confirmation of American speculation that the countries allowing Snowden to visit were getting information from him in exchange, but she said: “I would expect that Russian officials would be very eager to talk to him. And not only to talk to him to get information from him, but I suspect maybe to try to get him to stay here. Again, there’s no confirmation of that at all.”
She added that Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, had repeated to her that Moscow would consider any asylum request from Snowden.

I talked to Peskov yesterday morning and he said yes. I said, ‘Would you consider an asylum request from him?’ and he said, ‘Yes, that’s just standard procedure. That’s what we do for every application that we get.’