MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin, acceding to the anti-American fervor that has gripped the country’s legislature, said Thursday that he intends to sign a bill barring Americans from adopting Russian children.
Various Kremlin officials had criticized the bill, which was designed as a means of retaliation against a new American law that targets corrupt Russian officials, but Putin has chosen not to heed their advice.
Having spent the past year stoking hostility toward the United States, he is faced with an emotional response from parliament that seems to be on the verge of getting away from him. Though he raised questions about the adoption bill at his annual news conference this month, and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Science and Education Minister Dmitry Livanov, among others, have called it ill-advised, Putin said, “I have not seen any reason why I should not sign it.”
Assuming it is signed before New Year’s, the Russian bill would take effect Jan. 1. It would apply immediately to about 1,500 Russian children whose adoption cases are already in courts pending approval. Over the past 20 years, 60,000 Russians have been adopted by Americans, including a significant number with developmental disabilities.
The journalist Alexander Minkin, on his blog for the Ekho Moskvy website, described the Russian bill as “cannibalistic”: With Americans placing sanctions on certain corrupt Russian bureaucrats, he wrote, Moscow strikes back by punishing its own orphans.
The move abruptly cancels a painstakingly negotiated bilateral agreement regulating American adoptions of Russians. That agreement went into effect just weeks ago.
It is an “unfortunate” decision, the U.S. Embassy said in a statement released after the bill went through the lower house of parliament, “to take away these negotiated safeguards and ignore the hard work and negotiations on both sides that went into putting this agreement together.”
Putin has already described the agreement as ineffective and a case of “sham stupidity.”
The adoption law passed the lower house of the Russian parliament by a vote of 420 to 7, and the upper house unanimously.
