Comment by miroljub

> Snowden went to Russia.

He was stuck in an airport when his passport got cancelled. It's not really a free choice if you can't go anywhere else, and planes suspected of carrying you get forced to land, even if by virtue of being denied airspace access until they run out of fuel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SORM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roskomnadzor

freedom to _what_? Corruption is high, media is pretty restricted under Orban, and it doesn't look all that great for freely expressing your identity either. Whether Poland will follow their direction or manage to turn around is still up in the air.

You're only more "free" there if you have the money to bribe officials.

Snowden didn’t go to Russia because of the government there “valuing personal freedoms,” he went there bevause it is one of the very few major countries that absolutely will not cooperate with any extradition requests from western countries.

If you are thinking of going to east europe (and especially Russia) in search of personal freedoms, I got a bridge to sell you (for context, I grew up in Russia). The only “freedom” some of those countries might provide is the freedom from the long reach of the hands of western governments (and even that is a “maybe”, as Andrew Tate has been discovering recently).

Kremlin has full access to every service operating in Russia. If a service is banned in Russia, that's a service you should use. If it's not banned, it already has a backdoor.