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Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday he will sign a controversial bill banning Americans from adopting Russian children, a defiant move against the U.S. that has angered some Russians who argue it victimizes children to make a political point.

The law would block dozens of Russian children expected to be adopted by American families from leaving the country and cut off one of the main international routes for Russian children to leave often dismal orphanages. Russia is the single biggest source of adopted children in the U.S., with more than 60,000 Russian children being taken in by Americans over the past two decades.

The bill is retaliation for an American law that calls for sanctions against Russians deemed to be human rights violators and part of an increasingly confrontational stance by the Kremlin against the West.More at http://world.time.com/2012/12/27/putin-says-he-will-sign-anti-u-s-adop
tions-bill/

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Abandoned, neglected and abused, Russia's orphans are the silent victims of the country's economic and social collapse. While humanitarian organizations try to lessen the physical hardships, the struggle to ensure the respect and dignity of these children is only just beginning.

The facts are well known, kids tied to benches, lying immobile or tethered on urine-soaked sheets, corralled into wooden pens in the height of winter, beaten, starved, abandoned. Abandoned to the state, as Human Rights Watch said, in its chilling report Cruelty and Neglect in Russian Orphanages. But having read the report, having spent time in numerous orphanages of different categories and levels, your thoughts blur down an endless tunnel of confusion, depression, incomprehension, fear, outrage and finally numbness, a feeling of helplessness against a behemoth.

The pallid faces of babies in the "lying down rooms", the stoic, clinical, outdated dismissiveness: "This child is an idiot, that one's an imbecile," remind you how grim life is here. And the bile rises in your gut when you feel those tiny fingers grip yours and see the rotten teeth grinning a real child's smile. "Why don't you paint some pictures on the wall for them? Play some music? Take them out into the sunshine?"

"They are idiots. Ineducable. What's the point?"

Orphans and "social orphans" - children whose parents cannot care for them, or who have had their "parental rights" withdrawn - enter dom rebyonki or baby houses where they spend the first four years of life. At that point, an assessment is made by a board of state medical and educational reviewers and those with heavy mental or physical disabilities are given over to the care of the Ministry of Labour and Social Development. They are officially labelled as idiots and sent to closed institutions. There they remain till the age of 18 when - if they survive - they move to adult asylums for the rest of their lives.

There are 600,000 "orphans" in Russia, up to 95 per cent of them may have at least one living parent. But as conditions worsen, more and more children are being born handicapped, to parents who cannot support them, who are alcoholics, or diseased, or simply don't care. The system is cracking - lack of money means lack of food and clothes, which means poorer health, with fewer drugs to fight illness, less staff to cope, morale in a downward spiral...

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