A Russian-born teen is reopening wounds over American adoptions of Russian kids, now banned in the Motherland.  He left his adoptive parents in America and returned to his birth family in a provincial town on the Volga River.

18-year-old Alexander Abnosov appeared on state TV from his grandmother’s home in Cheboksary, 650 kilometers east of Moscow.  He claimed his American parents who adopted him at age 12 had cast him out of the house, and he had to live on the streets for a time before making his way back to Eastern Europe.  He also complained his American mother nagged at him for “small things”.

But the Komsomolskaya Pravda tabloid contacted the mother who said that Alexander ran off as soon as he turned 18, which is considered adulthood in America.  They tracked him down in a homeless shelter and he refused to return with them.

State television said Alexander’s adoptive father gave him $500 to buy a plane ticket to Russia.

Last December, Russia’s parliament passed a bill to ban adoptions by US parents.  It followed a series of cases of Russian children dying after adoption.  And one high-profile case had an American mother sending a child back to Russia after the two failed to bond, without notifying authorities.

But observers say international politics were more important to Russia’s anti-adoption law:  It closely followed the US passage of legislation to ban travel and freeze assets of officials implicated in the death of Sergei Magnitsky.  He died in prison after Russian officials denied him health treatment for a series of maladies for a year.  An autopsy showed he was also beaten shortly before death.

Magnitsky ran afoul of the government by exposing large-scale corruption by Russian officials. 

Their vengeance knows no boundaries:  Magnitsky is currently on trial for tax evasion, despite being entirely too dead to defend himself in court.