No news on the accreditation front yet, but some news that may affect your adoption travels to Russia. Kommersant and the Moscow Times are reporting that its Transportation Ministry is going to be going with same kind of liquids and gels restrictions that we now face for domestic travel in the United States. Russia has been enforcing the so-called 3-1-1 rule for travel between Russia and the U.S. and Canada since October 2006; the new decree would extend... more

The week began with the death of Boris Yeltsin, the man who set adoption upon the path on which it now finds itself in Russia. Yeltsin, Russia's first democratically elected president, was buried on Wednesday; former U.S. President Bill Clinton attended.

One day later, Russia's current president (and Yeltsin's chosen successor), Vladimir Putin, gave Russia's equivalent of a state of the... more

Let's start with the weirdest news first this week: Russia wants to build a tunnel to Alaska.

According to a report by Bloomberg, the tunnel would be the world's longest and would run under the Bering Strait. Why build a tunnel that far off the beaten path? To create a quicker way to move oil, natural gas and electricity from Siberia to the U.S. The report says the tunnel would take 10 to 15 years to complete.

Next in line, Boris... more

In the arts and cultural events calendar that I put up at the beginning of the month, I noted that there was going to be a big sale of Russian art at Christie's in New York mid-month. Well, if one picture is worth a thousand words, then the results of this sale--and a similar sale at Sotheby's--say more about the state of Russia's economic development than several hundred copies of Anna... more

In late February, Elizabeth Brainerd, an associate professor of economics at Williams College who studies the impact of economic transition and globalization on countries, gave a lecture on the causes and consequences of Russia's current demographic crisis.

I wasn't able to get to Williams to hear the talk, but Prof. Brainerd just let me know that the college has made her 40-minute lecture available as a podcast. It makes for interesting listening if you are trying to understand the pressures that right-wing politicians in... more

Roman Abramovich still didn't crack the top 10, but don't feel badly for him.

Abramovich, who was orphaned as a child, is now the 16th-richest man in the world according to Forbes, with a fortune estimated at $18.7 billion that got its start in oil. He leads a pack of 53 Russian billionaires. Think of that--53 billionaires in a country that less than a decade ago was in economic shambles, a country that two decades ago barely knew the meaning of the word capitalism. Russia's 53... more

My colleague over at Ethiopia Adoptions was recently ruminating on the poverty in that country. Russia is not nearly as badly off as Ethiopia, but the economic differences between the United States and Russia have shocked many people on their adoption journeys.

According to the CIA Factbook, Russia's per capita income in 2006 was an estimated $12,100. That puts Russia 81st on its list of all countries... more