Putin’s Orphans: Now Discontinued in America

Last month, Russian Dictator President Vladimir Putin signed a law banning U.S. adoptions of Russian orphans. True to the eye-for-an-eye political behavior that these rivaling countries have long presented, the law was passed in retaliation to the U.S. Magnitsky Act, intended to punish Russian diplomats involved in the extremely sketchy death of young lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky. For those who have trouble keeping track of who's who in suspicious deaths of Russian whistle-blowers, Magnitsky exposed the largest-ever case of tax refund fraud in Russia and was subsequently imprisoned, where he died one week before he was to stand trail.

In response to the Magnitsky Act, Putin enacted the ban on U.S adoptions, calling it the Dmitri Yakovlev bill, after a Russian toddler who died from heatstroke in 2008, when his adopted American father left him inside an overheated car for nine hours.

The political back and forth between Presidents Putin and Obama comes at the expense of real human lives. Russia currently boasts nearly 650,000 children legally considered to be orphans. Of these, 110,000 are housed in state run institutions. The United States adopts more Russian orphans per year than any other nation.

To downplay these statistics and the realization that President Putin is exploiting orphans for political leverage, the Kremlin has introduced a program cutely titled, “Russia without Orphans.” The plan is to increase the number of domestic adoptions by ten times over the next five to seven years. This falls under the assumption that the current growth rate of 110,000 new orphans per year will cease to exist and everyone will be satisfied and go back to eating borshch and uploading insane dashcam videos to YouTube.

Russian conspiracy theories are often as outrageous as Rasputin’s beard. This week, Pavel Astakhov, the Kremlin’s commissar for children’s rights, has been touting around a tall tale to just about any reporter who will hear him out. The watered down version is as follows: Americans have been secretly plotting to adopt all the babies out of Siberia so that they may one day swoop in, over take the land with ease (after all, very few lives will be sacrificed) and exploit the shit out of every natural resource…drill, baby, drill. While this theory seems utterly ridiculous, politicians like Astakhov are using it to justify their retaliatory piece of legislation.

The ban on adoptions by American families is especially worrisome for thousands of disabled orphans who do not have access to proper medical care. The quality of medical treatment in Russia is about a decade behind that of the U.S. due to a lack of funding for medical equipment and the poor organizational structure of its health care system. Children who could live relatively normal lives if treated and cared for in the United States could now face a lifetime of disability. Once they reach adulthood, disabled orphans are placed into the care of state-run nursing homes – which are notoriously dreary and futile – and really not the most righteous place to kick off your eighteenth year of life.

Russian Orphan Alexander D'Jamoos climbed Mount Kilimanjaro on prosthetic legs. What have you done today? 

Alexander D'Jamoos, a 21 year old University of Texas student, who spent the first fifteen years of his life in a Russian orphanage for disabled children, has written a letter to President Vladimir Putin, urging him to repeal the bill. D'Jamoos was born with deformed legs that prevented him from walking and spent his childhood scooting around on a make-shift skateboard. Through a fortunate, Cinderella story turn of events, he was adopted by a Texas family during a trip to the U.S. to be fitted with prosthetic legs. Thousands of other orphans, however, will not be so lucky.

Considering President Putin's no-fucks-given attitude, it is unlikely an online petition will do much to change his mind. And as Canada debates on whether to pass its own version of the Magnitsky Act, the potential for Russian orphans to find homes with North American families grows smaller. It is a shameful reality and a clear sign that while the Cold War may be over, the chill still lingers.

If you'd like to add your name to the petition against the ban on U.S. adoptions of Russian orphans, you can.

Kelsey is Polish, and therefore, genetically wired to be distrusting of Russia. Follow her on Twitter @KelseyPudloski.

More on Putin and Russians:

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Why I Was Taught to Hate Russians

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