Russia Grants Snowden 1-Year Asylum MOSCOW - Brushing aside pleas and warnings from President Obama and other senior American officials, Russia granted Edward J. Snowden temporary asylum and allowed him to walk free out of a Moscow airport transit zone on Thursday, ending his legal limbo there after more than five weeks. Mr. Snowden thanked Russia in a statement issued by WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy organization that has been assisting him. He accused the United States of disregarding the law in its global manhunt to arrest him and said that "in the end, the law is winning." Russia's decision, which infuriated American officials, significantly alters the legal status of Mr. Snowden, the former intelligence analyst wanted by the United States for leaking details of the National Security Agency's surveillance programs. Even as those leaks continued, Mr. Snowden now has legal permission to live - and conceivably even work - anywhere in Russia for as long as a year, safely out of the reach of American prosecutors. Mr. Snowden, 30, departed Sheremetyevo Airport unexpectedly at 3:30 in the afternoon after his lawyer, Anatoly G. Kucherena, delivered to him a passport-like document issued by the Federal Migration Service on Wednesday and valid until July 31, 2014. Mr. Kucherena said he would not disclose his whereabouts, though he expected Mr. Snowden could make a public appearance soon. "I cannot give out details," he said. Mr. Snowden left the airport's transit zone alone, an airport official said, but WikiLeaks later announced that he had left accompanied by one of the organization's representatives, Sarah Harrison, who apparently had remained with him since his flight began in Hong Kong in June. "We are extremely disappointed that the Russian Federation would take this step," the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, said in Washington. Obviously, this is not a positive development. Mr. Carney said President Obama had not decided whether to cancel a planned a trip to Moscow in September but he strongly suggested he would. "We are evaluating the utility of a summit," he said. Mr. Snowden, the spokesman said, was not a "whistle-blower," as his supporters contend but someone who has been indicted on felony charges of leaking classified information. Mr. Carney said the Russian decision "undermines a long history of law enforcement cooperation," mostly recently on the Boston Marathon bombings. American lawmakers have called for harsh retaliation against Russia, even a boycott of the Winter Olympic Games to be held in Sochi. Although President Vladimir V. Putin and President Obama both sought to avoid a direct diplomatic clash over Mr. Snowden, Mr. Putin and other officials here made clear they would under no circumstance extradite him, despite direct appeals from Secretary of State John Kerry and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. As recently as this week, American officials remained hopeful that some sort of agreement to return Mr. Snowden to the United States could be reached, according to officials in Washington and Moscow. One of Mr. Putin's aides, Yuri V. Ushakov, said on Thursday that Mr. Snowden's fate was of "insignificant character" and thus would not affect relations, according to the state news agency, RIA Novosti. He added that the Kremlin was aware that Mr. Obama might cancel his trip to Moscow but had received no official notification from officials in Washington. Mr. Putin, who spent the day at his official residence on the outskirts of Moscow, meeting with the president of Tajikistan, learned of Mr. Snowden's release on Thursday, the Kremlin's spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said. He added that the decision had been made by immigration officials and not by Mr. Putin, though it is widely assumed here that any decision with such potentially severe diplomatic consequences would require approval from within the Kremlin. "It has nothing to do with the president or his administration," Mr. Peskov said in a telephone interview. Andrew Roth and Nikolay Khalip contributed reporting from Moscow, and Mark Landler from Washington.