Since last year when U.S. Congress passed the Magnitsky Act aimed at official Russian corruption, the Kremlin has sought to gain political leverage by inflicting harm on its most vulnerable citizens. Russian lawmakers, at the instigation of the Kremlin, passed a law that prohibits Americans from adopting Russian orphans. For Russia’s Gazeta, President of Volunteers and Aid for Orphans Elena Alshanskaya describes the heartbreaking consequences for orphans that have been prevented from uniting with their would-be American families, what Russian lawmakers are doing to resolve the situation, and why it is wrong to sacrifice the lives of children for the sake of political posturing in the global arena.
For Gazeta, Elena Alshanskaya writes in part:
Fully developing a personality within a system of collective care will never occur. The potential and opportunities a child would have had, had they not been brought up in an orphanage, we will never know. Life in an orphanage is to forever steal the life of a child. We can say as loudly as we want that we saved a child from death. But what would have happened had he grown up in his own family?
A year has passed and according to publicly available data, there is information on 196 children who had already been matched with their potential American parents, but were not permitted to unite with them. Ninety five of them, despite the promises of our nation’s leaders to find these children families in Russia (and therefore a challenging enterprise!), remained in orphanages at the end of the year. For them this year, like hundreds of thousands of other children, nothing at all has changed.
Group upbringing, group breakfasts, group rooms in which children belonging to no one await an unknowable fate. Ninety five children who could already have been with a family for an entire year. That’s a lot by any measure. I believe that posturing in the international arena is not worth ruining the life of even a single child.
The need for officials to somehow take responsibility for their statements has led to orphans becoming a hot topic, which is unprecedented. The media, lawmakers, governors, and ministries – all have, in one way or another, discussed the issue, and measures have been taken to support adoptions by Russians. The discussion of why the problem remains unresolved despite multiple measures to support adoptive parents would take a long time. Generally speaking, they didn’t work.
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