President Vladimir Putin has granted Russian citizenship to former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, nine years after he exposed the scale of secret surveillance operations by the National Security Agency.

Mr Snowden, 39, fled the United States and was given asylum in Russia after leaking secret files in 2013 that revealed vast domestic and international surveillance operations carried out by the NSA, where he worked.

US authorities have for years wanted him returned to the United States to face a criminal trial on espionage charges.

There was no immediate reaction from Snowden, whose name appeared without Kremlin comment in a Putin decree conferring citizenship on a list of 72 foreign-born individuals.

The news prompted some Russians to jokingly ask whether Snowden would be called up for military service, five days after President Putin announced Russia’s first public mobilisation since World War II to shore up its faltering invasion of Ukraine.

“Will Snowden be drafted?” Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the state media outlet RT and a vocal President Putin supporter, wrote with dark humour on her Telegram channel.

Mr Snowden’s lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, told RIA news agency that his client could not be called up because he had not previously served in the Russian army.

Mr Snowden announced in November 2020 that he and his wife, Lindsay Mills, were applying for Russian citizenship in order not to be separated from their son, who was born that December.

He was granted permanent residency in 2020 and said at the time that he planned to apply for Russian citizenship, without renouncing his US citizenship.

That year a US appeals court found the program Mr Snowden had exposed was unlawful and that the US intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth.

President Putin, a former Russian spy chief, said in 2017 that Mr Snowden, who keeps a low profile while living in Russia, was wrong to leak US secrets but was not a traitor.