CONNECTION TO PIZZAGATE

This is related to Pizzagate because it concerns the dark underbelly of the international adoption industry which as one critic describes it, has been "a Wild West, all but free of meaningful law, regulation, or oversight" where babies and children from poor countries are bought and sold by unscrupulous entrepeneurs.

Russian adoptions have been in the U.S. headlines for the last few months because of the sensational news of the meeting in Trump Tower last June between Donald Trump, Jr., and Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian attorney who claimed to be lobbying influential Americans for the restart of Russian adoptions in the U.S.

Russian adoptions were banned by Putin when he signed the Dima Yakovlev Law in Dec. 28, 2012, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, a date of enormous symbolism.

The law met with instant international outrage and Putin was accused of being "Herod" and "cannibalalistic" and denying disadvantaged Russian children opportunities for American adoption as political retribution for the Magnitsky Act which sanctions on Russian officials.

As I have explained before, however, the Russian govt. had taken measures beginning in 2008 to introduce stricter controls on Russian adoptions in the US because of a number of cases of abuse and suspicious deaths of Russian adoptees.

In fact, a year after the Dimi Yakovlev Law was passed, the Russian govt. launched a criminal probe into online trafficking of Russian children in the U.S.

The Investigative Committee spokesperson Vladimir Markin said the case was started due to a journalistic investigation by Reuters and NBC initiated in September.According to investigators, illegal markets were created in the US on Yahoo and Facebook websites, on which illicit transactions concerning children adopted by US citizens were performed," he said.

He added that, following the reports, the committee had checked the information and decided to open a criminal case on human trafficking involving minors.

Thus, among others, transactions involving 26 underage Russian citizens were made and moreover, it was established that as the result of the deals some of them were sexually abused,” Markin said.

NEW DEVELOPMENTS

In a surprising (or not so surprising) turn of events, today Sputnik News reported upon the sudden discovery of hundreds of Russian-speaking children in an Iraqi orphanages in Mosul which was recently liberated by Iraqi and US coalition forces from Daesh terrorists:

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — On Friday, the Chechen leader (Ramzan Kadyrov) said that there could be some 300 children from Russia and from other members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in the orphanages of Iraq. At the same time he added that there could be about 400 children in the crisis-torn countries of the Middle East, citing Russian Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights Anna Kuznetsova.

https://sputniknews.com/world/201708101056333336-russian-children-iraqi-orphanages/

An RT article also reported on the case, claiming that dozens of Russian children whose parents joined ISIS are being repatriated to Russia:

A four-year-old Chechen boy has been brought back to Russia after living with his jihadist father, who was fighting alongside ISIS in Mosul. Russian authorities are now seeking the return of several dozen such children from Iraqi orphanages.

https://www.rt.com/news/398910-russia-return-children-mosul-isis/

CONCLUSION

Perhaps this tragic discovery can be attributed to predictable fallout from war, or perhaps these children are trafficking victims---it's not possible to tell from these articles. What is certain, however, is the peculiar outrage of the zeitgeist over Putin's Russian adoptions ban, which is summed up very well in this sinister tweet I found today responding to a WaPo article on Paul Manafort's house being raided by the FBI:

Do not. I repeat, DO NOT screw with Russian adoptions.

https://twitter.com/Yup4Life/status/895293360004632576