“Snowden’s residency in Russia has just been extended by another couple of years,” the spokeswoman of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, said in a post on Facebook.

The news were reported by The Guardian, the British newspaper through which Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, revealed the scale of its surveillance program. Snowden has been living in Russia since then, to avoid facing prosecution in the U.S.

The announcement comes hours after Barack Obama decided to commute the prison sentence of Chelsea Manning, the US military whistleblower who leaked 700,000 documents to Wikileaks and was jailed for 35 years in 2013. 

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and former analyst of the United States National Security Agency Edward Snowden have applauded the commutation of the sentence of Chelsea Manning.