Russian ban on American adoptions of Russian children

It has been with great sadness that I, and many others, have followed the surrealistic “tit for tat” saga between the U.S. and Russia.

President Obama signed a law earlier this month that, among things like normalizing trade relations with Russia, also enacts some restrictions on some Russians identified as human rights violators, like they can’t visit the U.S. and can’t keep their money in U.S. banks. (Somehow, I suspect that they aren’t interested in doing either, anyway, but that’s beside the point.) In “retaliation”, the Russian Duma passed bill banning Americans from adopting Russian orphans, and President Putin signed it yesterday.

This brilliant post on VOA’s Russian Watch blog, A Kremlin Christmas Carole: Russia’s Scrooge Against The Orphans?, sums the situation up much better than I ever could. Some quick stats, for those not inclined to click the link and read the full post:

– 60,000 Russian orphans have been adopted by Americans since 1991.
– 19 Russian children have died following abuse by American foster parents in the past 20 years.
– 1,200 Russian adopted children were killed by their Russian foster parents from 1991 to 2006.
– 1 awful American woman placed her seven-year-old adopted son alone on a one-way flight back to Moscow in 2010.
– 4,500 children were returned to orphanages last year by Russian foster parents.
– 1,291 Russian children were killed, largely by a parent, during the first nine months of this year.
– Russia ranks third in the world for suicides by minors, about 1,700 a year. One boy committed suicide because a Russian judge refused to allow him to be adopted by a Spanish couple.

I find no words… so cruel, so sad, so tragic.