Voice of America: American mom vs. Russian politicians
Russian politicians have made political hay this week out of the recent unexplained death in Texas of Max Shatto, a three-year-old boy adopted in Russia.
First, Pavel Astakhov, Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, issued a statement declaring: “Urgent! In the state of Texas, an adoptive mother killed a three-year-old Russian child.”
The facts that the boy apparently died while playing outside and that the autopsy is not complete did not stop Astakhov. He is the ideological father of a new Russian law that bans adoptions of Russian children by Americans. He immediately demanded that the United States provide a registry of each of the 60,000 Russian orphans adopted by American families over the last 20 years.