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Additionally, you neglect to mention that is was the US actions in cancelling his passport that stranded Snowden in the Moscow airport that he was transiting through on the way to Ecuador.
" The Chinese government made the final decision to allow Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, to leave Hong Kong on Sunday, a move that Beijing believed resolved a tough diplomatic problem even as it reaped a publicity windfall from Mr. Snowden’s disclosures, according to people familiar with the situation."
So it's 100% on the US government that he ended up in Russia and not Ecuador
Once it got escalated past them, onto Putin's desk, Snowden wasn't going anywhere. Why would he let a juicy trading chip like that go?
Why not?
The fact of being a whistleblower is orthogonal to whether you abscond and where to. And Russia wasn't a "hostile country" - many of the biggest companies in the US had operations in Russia.