To date, 17 Russian-born orphans adopted in the United States have died at the hands of their foster parents. Speaking in Moscow Monday, the Russian children’s rights Ombudsman Pavel Astakhov urged the American authorities to thoroughly investigate the latest instance of abuse of Russian-born adoptees in the United States.Three teenage girls in the case were victims of beatings and sadistic torture at the hands of the Leszczynski couple, Larimer, Colorado.
The man and wife, named Steve and Edelvina, are now facing criminal charges.Astakhov accuses American social services of neglecting duty and failing to promptly detect the abuse.Indeed, the uncovered mistreatment goes quite some time back.
One day last winter, one of the girls turned up for classes with a badly bruised face. It turned out that her foster mother had hurled a heavy boot at her. A subsequent inquest also reported other abuse techniques, such as making the girls walk on their hands, stay outdoors in biting frost or pouring rain, run barefoot to 25 miles, punch one another in the face and do multiple push-ups on steel nails. The arsenal also included threats to return the girls to their orphanages in Russia.
Symptomatically, the US authorities ignored the fact that all Russian adoptees under 18 remain Russian nationals and their status and progress must be regularly reported to Russian consular officers. In the Leszczynski case, the Russian side got its first word of trouble in the Colorado family from the American media.All Russia-US adoptions are now on hold, pending a formal bilateral agreement on the matter.
We hear from Ombudsman Pavel Astakhov: The proposed agreement should commit the adopting couples to regularly reporting the conditions and progress of their adoptees to American social services and Russian consular officers. It should also contain retroactive clauses for making a flawed adoption null and void. It is quite strange that Russia and the United States have so long fared without any such agreement.
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