MOSCOW (Reuters) - The news that an American woman rejected her adopted son and sent him back to Russia alone is just a new twist on a familiar tragedy for adoptive parent Svetlana Shashina: she has seen it happen before.
When Shashina and her husband were in the process of adopting their own daughter Nadya at a Moscow orphanage, another Russian woman returned a child to the institution.
"Irresponsibility knows no nationality," Shashina, 35, said on Wednesday, as two-and-a-half-year-old Nadya bustled around her. "No matter how a child is returned, it is a huge trauma."
Shashina, who also has three older children by birth, hopes Tennessee nurse Torry Hansen's return this month of Artyom Savelyev, now eight, does not cause lasting disruption to U.S. adoptions of Russian children.
Russia is threatening to halt all adoptions by U.S. parents unless the United States agrees to a treaty Moscow says would add order to the process and help protect Russian-born children from abuse by adoptive American parents.
A U.S. State Department delegation is to meet Russian officials in Moscow on Thursday in a bid to defuse a crisis that could undermine fragile improvements in relations between Moscow and Washington.
More than 60,000 Russian children have been adopted by foreigners, mostly Americans, since the 1991 collapse of Communism opened up Russia to the West.
Russian children's rights advocate Boris Altshuler likened the phenomenon to a "rescue operation" that saved children from "impossible, monstrous conditions" at state institutions in Russia. But it has also dealt an additional blow to Russia's wounded pride in the wake of the Soviet Union's break-up.
The rejection of Savelyev -- put on a flight to Moscow with a note describing him as mentally unbalanced and violent -- compounded anger over the deaths of 15 Russian-born children as an apparent result of abuse by their adoptive American parents in the years since the adoptions began.
"The loss of trust is huge, and the question is: 'How can we regain that?'" said Karyn Purvis, director of the Institute of Child Development at Texas Christian University.
In an interview with Reuters on Tuesday, Kremlin children's rights ombudsman Pavel Astakhov repeated Russia's threat to implement a formal freeze on adoptions by Americans -- which he said have already been suspended de facto in Russia's courts -- -- if the United States baulks at a treaty. He warned lawmakers could try to outlaw foreign adoptions altogether.
"We are agreeing with America today on reducing nuclear missiles, and we can't agree on children? I think that's wrong and unfair, and it looks a little crazy for us -- for countries that are rightfully considered civilized and great."
Russia tightened the rules for foreign adoptions after a series of abuse-related deaths in the United States. U.S. parents adopted 1,585 children in Russia last year, according to the State Department -- far below a peak of 5,863 in 2004.
Advocates of foreign adoptions point out that cruelty cases are exceptions, and say children may also face abuse at the hands of adoptive Russian parents and in state orphanages.
Astakhov suggested that improving conditions in Russian orphanages and an increase in adoption by Russians have made foreign adoptions less crucial. Adoption by Americans is no guarantee of a better life, he said.
But Altshuler contended conditions are little improved. And with some 120,000 children joining the ranks of those no longer in the care of their birth parents annually, he said the number of adoptions by Russians -- 7,000 last year -- remains modest.
"There is only one humane way to decrease foreign adoptions -- make things good for children here," Altshuler said.
Child advocates and adoptive parents say that no orphanage is a substitute for a successful adoption.
Yelena Lagutina, a psychologist who worked at a state orphanage for six years before joining Kidlinks International, a group that aids people raised in state institutions, said adoptees have far better chances of adjusting to adult life.
"I think people don't understand how desperate a child is living in an orphanage, and how much they're lacking as far as the care they need as a child," said Kidlinks head Don Horwitz, an American who adopted three daughters in Russia.
But he said governments, orphanages and prospective parents need to do more to ensure adoptions do not go wrong.
"Many times a parent will think, 'I'm going to provide this child with a lot of love, I'm going to provide this child with a good home, I'm going to save this child's life in two weeks' -- and it just doesn't work like that," he said.
Regardless of whether Washington and Moscow resolve the dispute, the orphans at a drab, yellow-brick boarding school for visually impaired children in Meshchovsk, southwest of Moscow, may never have a chance of life in a new family.
The director, Nadezhda Grishkina, said the school sends updates on its charges to regional authorities every year to enter in a database of potential adoptees.
"All the information is there -- weight, height, a photograph, birth details," Grishkina said. "But so far we have not had such a case, where someone has adopted one of our children."
(Additional reporting by Conor Humphries, Igor Belyatski, Mikhail Antonov and Nikolai Isayev; editing by Mark Trevelyan)
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