Russia Wants Adopted Child Back After Brother Dies in U.S.

Russia is seeking to repatriate the brother of a three-year-old boy who died in Texas after being adopted by a U.S. family, less than two months after Moscow banned all adoptions by Americans.

“We have every reason to demand the return of the boy to his homeland,” Pavel Astakhov, Russia’s ombudsman for children’s rights, told reporters in Moscow today. “If adoptive parents have committed a crime, we are entitled to demand the child come home.”

The toddler died on Jan. 21 after an alleged fatal beating by his adoptive American mother. He and his two-year-old brother were adopted at the end of last year from an orphanage in the Pskov region in the country’s northwest. Astakhov said he had been asked by the boys’ biological mother to help get the child back to Russia. The woman says she has found a job and stopped her “antisocial lifestyle,” according to Astakhov.
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