The adoption of Russian children by foreign nationals has been completely halted, according to Anna Kuznetsova, deputy speaker of the lower house, the country's State Duma.
Foreign adoption rates have steadily decreased over the past decade. The number has dropped from 529 Russian children adopted in 2018-2019 and 164 children in 2020-2022, to six in 2023, Kuznetsova said at a parliamentary session last month. “In 2024, this process was stopped completely,” she told the Telegram channel Duma TV on Wednesday.
”We will take care of our children ourselves. Today, we see that the number of our citizens who want to take a foster child into their family is growing,” the lawmaker stated. She emphasized the need to “strengthen our work” with the biological relatives of these children to prevent them from entering the foster care system in the first place.
All offices of foreign NGOs providing adoption services in Russia have been closed since 2023, and citizens of several countries are prohibited from adopting Russian children. The 2013 ‘Dima Yakovlev Law’ banned adoptions by Americans after a Russian orphan adopted by a Virginia couple was left in a car for nine hours and died of heat stroke.
In 2022, lawmakers proposed expanding the adoption ban to all “unfriendly countries.” They argued that sending Russian children there would be a “blow to the future of the nation” since the West “destroys traditional values.” However, President Vladimir Putin objected, stating that the way it was drafted would infringe on the rights of Ukrainians living on Russian territory.
Russia banned same-sex couples from adopting children in 2013. The Russian Orthodox Church has since proposed preventing international adoptions by couples from countries that allow “gender reassignment” procedures.
The idea received the backing of lawmakers, and last month the State Duma passed a bill in its first reading prohibiting the adoption of children by citizens of “pro-transgender” countries. At the time, State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin noted that since the collapse of the Soviet Union, more than 120,000 Russian children had been adopted by families worldwide.
”We have begun to put things in order to protect the rights of those who have just been born,” Volodin said, adding that the draft bill seeks to ensure that no child ends up “in a family where pedophilia flourishes, where they are mistreated, or where same-sex couples adopt a child.”