A group of Russian lawmakers have introduced a bill that would ban the adoption of Russian children by citizens from so-called unfriendly countries.
The draft bill appeared on the website of the Russian parliament's lower chamber, the State Duma, on August 1.
The document, which is attached to a bill on amendments to Russia's Family Code, says the "upbringing of [Russian] orphans in unfriendly countries is a blow to the nation's future."
"For many years 'the collective West' has disrupted the issues of good and evil, destroyed traditional family values," the document says, adding that as of January 2021, 17,498 Russian orphans were living abroad with adoptive families.
The move appears to expand legislation known as Dima Yakovlev's law, which was signed by President Vladimir Putin in December 2012 to bar U.S. citizens from adopting Russian children.
That law was adopted in retaliation to a U.S. law imposing asset freezes and visa bans on Russians accused by Washington of human rights abuses, including those believed involved in the death of a whistleblowing Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, in a Moscow jail in 2009.
In March this year, just days after Russia launched its ongoing unprovoked invasion of Ukraine that was condemned by the West and many other countries, Putin ordered the government to create a registry of "unfriendly nations."
The list includes the United States, Canada, Britain, Ukraine, Australia, Singapore, Japan, New Zealand, Taiwan, Micronesia, Montenegro, Albania, Switzerland, Andorra, South Korea, Lichtenstein, Monaco, Norway, San Marino, the Czech Republic, North Macedonia, Croatia, Denmark, Greece, Slovakia, and Slovenia.