The New Yorker: SNOWDEN CALLS RUSSIAN-SPY STORY “ABSURD”

[struggle4progress]

93. His connections were able to engineer his travel without passport from Hong Kong to Russia,

his US passport having been revoked before his Aeroflot flight to Moscow

One difficulty for travelers without a passport is that carriers may refuse to transport the passenger, since they may be required to transport the passenger elsewhere if entry is denied at the destination. If Snowden had been taken by an airline somewhere and then denied entry, the airline would presumably have been in the awkward position of being responsible for a passenger from Hong Kong, whom they could not discharge and could not return to Hong Kong for discharge.
But Aeroflot is only semi-private, with majority Russian state ownership. So Russian state willingness to accept Snowden without a passport could have made it easy to put him on the Aeroflot to Moscow

He would have had other options as well, had he been able to convince another government to issue him a travel document. In fact, such a travel document for Snowden at one point appeared from the now-famous Ecuadorian embassy in London -- though its provenance was subsequently loudly disputed by the Ecuadorian government, with the result that the document was useless to Snowden for travel purposes