Putin vows to ban adoptions by US citizens In the face of unprecedented dissent from within his government and ruling circle, Vladimir Putin on Thursday vowed to sign a controversial law banning adoptions by US parents, risking a backlash from Russians who feel the Kremlin is playing politics with vulnerable lives. Mr Putin said he saw "no reason not to sign" the bill, passed overwhelmingly last week by the lower house of parliament and on Wednesday by the upper house. But he told a group of regional and federal officials that he would "have to review the final text and weigh everything." The law is retaliation for the Magnitsky Act, passed by the US Congress this month, which imposes a travel blacklist and financial sanctions on Russian officials accused of human rights abuses. However, on Thursday Russia's ministry of justice joined a rising chorus of criticism of the law, saying it violated the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Russia is a signatory. In recent days prominent officials, from Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to Deputy Prime Minister Olga Golodets, have voiced reservations, mostly on legal grounds. "This law has destroyed the professional reputations of 400 parliamentarians [who voted for the law]," said Mikhail Prokhorov, billionaire owner of the Brooklyn Nets basketball club and former candidate for president. Writing on his blog, he said the Russian ruling class was in the midst of a "schism." "The conflict of two Russias which developed gradually at a lower level has reached the elite," he said. If you compare the elite to the brain of a patient, the diagnosis is clear: acute schizophrenia. Russia's "Anti-Magnitsky law," as the bill is known in the press, has also been dubbed the "Dima Yakovlev law," after a Russian toddler who died of heatstroke in 2008 after his American adoptive father left him in an overheated car. The law's supporters say they are concerned for the safety of Russian children adopted in the US, while detractors point out that statistically Russian children are safer in the US than they are in Russia. A poll by the Moscow-based Public Opinion Foundation found 56 per cent of respondents in favour of the new law. "The supporters believe that children should be at home," said Alexander Oslon, director of the polling agency, whose main client is the Kremlin. An exasperated Mr Putin told officials on Thursday: "I am sure there are a lot of places in the world where the living standard is higher than here. And so what? We have to send all our children there? Maybe we should all move there ourselves? However, child welfare workers say that the president is missing the point of the debate - that Russia's badly run child welfare system fails Russian children on a massive scale. The bill has come to symbolise for many the plight of over 100,000 Russian orphans and abandoned children who are eligible for adoption, but only a handful of which are taken every year by Russians. US citizens adopted just under 1,000 in 2011, while Russian families adopted or fostered roughly 7,400. "The problem is that the president is clearly not informed about the state of our child welfare system," said Valery Panyushkin, a Moscow journalist who has written extensively on Russia's orphanage system. He doesn't understand that the discussion is about 130,000 to 150,000 gravely ill children, many of whom cannot be helped here in Russia. It is worse than if he were just being inhumane. His public remarks indicate that he is the president of the country, and he doesn't know of the existence of this problem. Lyudmilla Petranovskaya, a child psychologist who works with adopted children, said: "The one good thing this law has done is that it has fixed attention on our child welfare system."