The USA have initiated one of the biggest denouncement campaigns in its very history against this man. Nobody sane would have not fled in that situation.
The goal was always to get into either China or Russia. They are the only geopolitical heavyweights that wouldn't have folded like Ecuador did with Assange.
It's amazing how the "American whistleblower randomly ended up in Russia during transit" revisionism is being pushed.
Ecuador folded because Assange was inside the embassy, in what ultimately is UK soil. There was no way, when push came to shove, to prevent him from being captured. If Assange was in Ecuador proper, they might not have folded, or he might have been able to leave Ecuador for, say, Cuba before the hammer dropped. I imagine this was Snowden's plan since he wanted to go to Cuba, Ecuador, or Venezuela. If he wanted to stay in Russia he wouldn't even have noticed his passport being deactivated, and if he wanted to go to China, he would have went to Shenzhen from Hong Kong instead of going to Russia first.
In theory, it does. In practice, pretty nobody actually does this, because it's largely unenforced, and on the other hand, nobody wants to lose their internal passport and have to go through the headache of replacing it. Losing your international passport as a non-citizen would be even worse.
A cop on the street isn't going to check whether your passport was or wasn't revoked (and in fact simply can't). You would only notice that at the airport. And he did in fact claim that he noticed this in the airport, when trying to leave Russia.
This is a misconception, it isn't. It's extraterritorial-ish, meaning that the host country temporarily and revocably confers the privilege for that area to be under different laws. It's revocable at any time with sufficient notice, and it stays sovereign soil of the original country.
