This is actually an interesting question. Just being granted citizenship doesn't mean you are automatically issued a passport. That requires a separate applic

This is actually an interesting question. Just being granted citizenship doesn't mean you are automatically issued a passport. That requires a separate application process, where the government can probably refuse your request for any reason, or for none at all. I don't know how it works in Russia specifically, but I think in most countries the issuing of passports is subject to executive discretion, and even if Snowden technically has the possibility of challenging such a refusal in court, I don't imagine a court ruling against the Kremlin. Assuming he did have a passport, though, the question becomes "How could he escape Russia?". Russia probably has a system for recording the passport numbers of people who should be detained if they try to leave the country, but maybe that system isn't 100% effective when it comes to Russia's vast remote borders and enforcement officers who might be willing to take a bribe. (If you were going to disobey your orders like that, though, you'd probably also want to seek political asylum in whichever country you were supposed to be guarding the border with, since Putin probably won't respond well to the news that his political pawn has slipped out of his grasp). Then the problem becomes "How does Snowden remain a free man while the US are after him?". I don't know if he's on a secret Interpol wanted list, and they probably don't have his (hypothetical) new Russian passport number, so he might be safe for a while. But suppose he manages to get as far as Finland or Norway. Could he really then catch a flight to Ecuador without his plane being forced to land so he can be arrested on America's behalf? I think his best bet would be to travel (visa free) to Georgia, in a bus or something. Then fly from Tbilisi to Doha, and from there to Caracas, with a final leg to Quito. Alternatively, if he wanted to live in a G20 nation without a formal extradition treaty with the US, he could travel east to Indonesia. One final consideration is that Biden might actually want to pardon him (or at least pre-emptively reduce his sentence to some token amount, like one year, if that's even constitutionally possible). In such a scenario, it might be dangerous to announce this pardon while Snowden is still in Russia, since it makes him look like more of a flight risk, so the CIA would presumably have to contact him securely (I see the irony with that) and tell him that if he can get to a neutral third country, Biden will publicly announce the pardon. That would then make Snowden's travel out of Georgia (for example) a lot easier.