On Saturday, November 23, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a bill into law that effectively bans the adoption of Russian children by citizens of countries where gender-affirming care and gender recognition are legal.

Approved by the Russian Duma earlier this month, the law prohibits certain foreign nationals from adopting or taking guardianship over children born in Russia. The countries included in the ban are Australia, Austria, Argentina, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, and more. Adoptions of Russian children by US citizens have already been banned since 2012.

As reported by Russian news outlet Zona Media, the law’s explanatory notes state: “The most dangerous thing in this situation is that the state can control the absence of a gender change in potential adoptive parents only at the time of adoption on the territory of the Russian Federation.”

The notes continue: “Therefore, a foreign citizen who has adopted a child who is a citizen of Russia, after returning to the territory of the state of his citizenship, can already change the gender, but the worst thing is that he can change the gender of the adopted child, for example, by starting to use hormone replacement therapy, which is unacceptable!”

In addition to the adoption ban, Putin also signed a second bill into law banning the spread of material that encourages people not to have children, described as “childfree propaganda”. Under this law, media companies are required to monitor content to ensure compliance, with the only exemption being portrayals of celibacy in the context of monastic life. The measure imposes fines of up to 5 million rubles (over €45,000).

Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, who authored the bills, said: “These bills are designed to protect people, ensure their health and safety. It is necessary to do everything so that new generations of our citizens grow up oriented toward traditional family values.”

Volodin defended the laws, saying that “to protect people from propaganda of childlessness, it is necessary to limit the distribution of destructive content on the Internet, in the media, in movies, and advertising”. He added that the laws were necessary to protect people from the “propaganda of pedophilia, LGBT, and gender reassignment.”

In recent years, Russia has introduced a series of laws aimed at suppressing the rights of LGBTQ+ people and bolstering so-called “traditional values” in rhetoric opposite to the supposedly “degenerate” Western liberalism.

Last year, Putin signed a law prohibiting trans people from changing their gender on official documents, becoming foster or adoptive parents, and legally marrying.

Later in 2023, the Russian Supreme Court passed a motion to label the international LGBTQ+ movement an “extremist organisation”. After the decision, activists noted that the motion was lodged against a movement that is not an official entity and that, because of its broad and vague definition, it gives authorities wide latitude to arrest and prosecute LGBTQ+ people.