Russian President Vladimir Putin has hinted that Russia may be able to offer Syrian President Bashar al-Assad asylum should he need to flee Syria. The Russian leader said if President Assad were pushed from office early, Russia would grant him asylum. “We granted asylum to Mr. Snowden, which was far more difficult than to do the same for Mr. al-Assad,” Mr Putin said in an interview on Tuesday. Washingtonpost.com reports: Putin was referring to Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who fled to Moscow after releasing reams of classified documents about U.S. surveillance programs. Snowden was granted asylum in Russia in 2013. The Kremlin is one of Assad’s strongest foreign backers, and Russian airstrikes have pummeled Syrian opposition forces since the end of September, bolstering the beleaguered Assad regime. But Putin has long been said to take a dim view of Assad himself, an ophthalmologist-turned-president who has been engaged in a brutal civil war since the Arab Spring protests of early 2011. Dating back to the Soviet era, Syria has been the Kremlin’s biggest ally in the Middle East, and Russia has maintained a naval base in Latakia for decades. Putin’s surprise intervention in Syria was widely seen as an effort [...]