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Number of foreign adoptions in Russia drops by 11 times since 2012

The number of adoptions by Russians also halved in this period

© Yury Belinsky/TASS

MOSCOW, December 21. /TASS/. The number of Russian orphans adopted by foreigners has dropped from 2,604 in 2012 to 240 in 2019, or by almost 11 times. The number of adoptions by Russians also halved in this period, the official statistic shows.

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As of 2012, Italians adopted the most Russian children (762), followed by the US nationals (646), Spaniards (502), French (245) and Germans (129). However, this list changed significantly in 2019, as Italians adopted 165 orphans, followed by Argentinians (23), Spaniards (16) and French (12).

Moreover, Russians adopted 6,565 children in 2012, but the number of adoptions was steadily decreasing to reach 3,252 in 2019.

In late November, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova reported that the number of orphans in Russia dropped by 15% since early 2018, from 50,000 to 42,000.

Russia enacted the law banning US citizens from adopting Russian children on January 1, 2013. These measures were included in the Russian response to the US Magnitsky Act. The Russian law came to be known as Dima Yakovlev law after a Russian boy who tragically died in his adoptive family in the US. The law prohibits adoption of children with Russian citizenship by US citizens and also bans bodies and agencies seeking to select orphans and facilitate adoption by Americans in Russia.

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