NSA leaker Edward Snowden has finally been allowed to leave the Moscow airport after spending over a month in the transit zone. The Russian government has given him one-year temporary asylum while he still tries to get to a country that will offer him permanent asylum.

The news comes over a week after reports assumed that Snowden was finally going to be able to leave the airport on July 24, since his Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, appeared to be bringing him the paperwork he needed to leave. However, it turned out that Kucherena wasn’t carrying any documents and that Snowden’s application for temporary asylum hadn’t been approved yet.

According to RT.com, Kuchera said today that Snowden has been allowed to leave and was granted temporary asylum for a year. “I have just handed over to him papers from the Russian Immigration Service. They are what he needs to leave the transit zone,” Kuchera told reporters, holing up a copy of the papers. Now that he has been granted asylum, Snowden can only return to the U.S. if he does so voluntarily.

Wikileaks later celebrated the news on Twitter, but noted that this is just the first step. “Edward Snowden was granted temporary asylum in Russia for a year and has now left Moscow airport under the care of WikiLeaks' Sarah Harrison,” the organization said. “We would like to thank the Russian people and all those others who have helped to protect Mr. Snowden. We have won the battle--now the war.”

A U.S. official told CNN that the news was not surprising, since the Russian government "has been signaling ... for some time” that it would grant Snowden’s request. Still, the news will make U.S.-Russian relations even more contentious, even as the two countries work together on security for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.

Meanwhile, The U.K. Guardian has published another document from Snowden, showing plans for XKeyscore, an NSA program that monitored Internet activity. One of the presentations the paper published claims that it covers “nearly everything a typical user does on the internet.”

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