Buck went on to say that she would like to experience more of her native country. Then she added, “I don’t support Russia and what’s going on.”
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has complicated the lives of children like Buck, one of tens of thousands of children adopted from Russia in the 1990s and early 2000s, and their families, as ‘they navigate layers of feelings about their Russian identity in the context of a war.
Mara Kamen, president of Families for Russian and Ukrainian Adoption (FRUA), a volunteer-run organization that runs a network of around 7,000 member families who have adopted children from the former Soviet bloc, said children and teenagers adopted from Russia felt deeply hurt. last weeks.
“Even though we can talk about ‘It’s about the governments and not the Russian people’, some children have been accused of being Russian spies by their friends at school,” Kamen says. “Now whether it’s teasing or whether they really mean it, our kids are taking it pretty badly. They take it very personally.
Buck says Putin’s invasion changed his willingness to talk about his Russian identity in some spaces.
“I used to be very open about being adopted from Russia,” says Buck, of Orono, Minn. “Most of my friends know that, and we used to talk about it and just have conversations, jokes about me being in ballet because I’m Russian. And ever since that [invasion] happened, I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to say that in public.’ That people will think I’m for this invasion. That it will ruin my reputation, or just ruin who I am.
More than 60,000 Russian children were adopted by American families between 1992 and 2012, according to US State Department figures. The Dima Yakovlev law, signed by Putin in December 2012, went into effect in 2013 and banned the adoption of Russian children by US citizens, which means that most children adopted from Russia and living in the US are now teenagers and young adults.
Janice Goldwater, founder and CEO of Adoptions Together, a nonprofit that supports adoptive families through educational programs and counseling services, says the best thing parents of children adopted from Russia can do is to “stay curious” and give their children a space to talk about it. how they feel.
“The feelings the children have are hard,” says Goldwater, a licensed social worker whose adopted daughter was born in Russia. “They are complicated. They are traumatic. For many of them, it evokes the deep instability and trauma of their past. I think a lot of people are scared and angry. My own child is furious. She just can’t believe that anyone, that Putin is acting this way, and that so many people would be hurt. She almost feels a sense of violation, of ‘How could their country do such a thing?’ I think it’s embarrassing to come from a place that would be so aggressive in its actions, and there’s a sense of disappointment.
Ryan Sumwalt, 12, was adopted from Balashikha, Russia in 2010 and now lives in Matthews, North Carolina. He had just started getting to know his biological sister – who sent him a video last year introducing herself, sharing her love for Disney and drawing – and tried to work with his mother and an interpreter to call his biological family in Russia after the invasion.
“I was a bit worried because they lost all their money,” he said, referring to the ruble’s fall. “I was a bit disappointed because we were really hoping to get them to answer the phone and finally talk to them for once. But since the invasion we haven’t been able to contact them.
Ryan’s mother, Christa Sumwalt, 49, says the invasion caused a lot of disruption in her son’s life, mostly because he dreamed of returning to Russia to meet his birth family; after covid-19 and the invasion they don’t know if and when it can happen. Sumwalt, whose 14-year-old son Andrew is also adopted from Russia, says she is particularly torn by the economic sanctions she believes are necessary to stop Putin and their impact on the well-being of Ryan’s birth family. .
“The narrative that I tried to keep with the kids is that the Russians, the ones we met, are good people.” said Sumwalt, 49. “It’s just that their leader is an autocrat who is currently making some really bad decisions that are having a terrible impact on people.”
Cade Schuetter, 15, who lives in suburban Annapolis and was adopted in Kirov, Russia, in 2007, says feelings of uncertainty have dominated since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
“I don’t understand why everything is happening and why, and exactly why the country I’m from is invading another country and what their intentions are,” he says. “I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to feel about being Russian and how my own blood contributes to the war.”
His father, Scott Schuetter, says Cade’s friends used to joke about him being Russian in a mildly positive way. His baseball friends, for example, would say things like, “Everybody’s cold, but Cade isn’t cold because he’s Russian.”
“He is now more hesitant to openly admit that he comes from Russia with new interactions because of what is happening,” says Schuetter, 46.
As Kary Lawrence of Rockville, Maryland recounts seeing pictures of young Russian soldiers in Ukraine, she begins to cry. Several of the soldiers appeared to be around the same age as her own sons, Nicholas Lawrence, 19, and Dmitri Lawrence, 18, whom she and her husband adopted from Russia.
“They are very young. They are like my boys,” says Lawrence, 58. “For me, thinking they could have been there, it makes me sad that there are other kids born around the same time who are thrown in there.
She says Dmitri, who was adopted aged 3 in 2007, was so interested in the war in Ukraine that Lawrence, who teaches him at home, will turn next month to a current affairs unit chronicling which led to Putin’s invasion, followed by an exploration of Russian and Soviet history.
In their Maryland home, a pair of red matryoshka dolls, or nesting dolls, stand next to a framed photo of her boys on their fireplace mantle. She and her husband, Barney Lawrence, bought several each time they traveled to Russia to adopt their sons.
Lawrence says that as the war in Ukraine continues, “I hope my sons know they should always be proud of their heritage. I want them to know that they can still be proud to be Russians.
Buck felt so horrified by what happened to the Ukrainians that she boarded a plane for Romania last week with her father, Jim Buck, CEO of a medical device company, to help the families of Ukrainian refugees who were pouring into the country. (According to the United Nations, more than 555,000 Ukrainian refugees have entered Romania.)
Jim Buck says he is working with lawyers to set up a special interest vehicle to fund rental apartments in Bucharest for Ukrainians, who would live there rent-free. The Bucks have since returned home.
Barrett Buck says her priority is to do something tangible for Ukrainian refugees, but also “to help me personally feel like I’m doing what I can when the country I’m inheriting is causing this. I feel like it’s a way to stand up to Putin and show everyone, “Hey, I’m Russian.” I am against that. And I do stuff to fight against that. ”