After more than a year of negotiations, the United States and Russia  signed a bilateral agreement to strengthen procedural safeguards in adoptions on July 13, 2011.  The new framework “will largely eliminate independent adoptions from Russia” and will improve post-adoption reporting and monitoring.  There was this announcement from the State Department  which links to a series of FAQs.  US Citizenship and Immigration Services has also issued a Fact Sheet on the new Agreement.  Russia has not joined the multilateral Hague Adoption Convention, but some provisions of the new bilateral agreement draw on provisions of the Convention.

See also this story in the New York Times by Michael Schwirtz: “Pact on Adoptions Ends a U.S.-Russian Dispute” (July 13, 2011).