Yes, I know, I wasn't trying to turn it into some political question when I wrote "Russia / Chechniya", quite the contrary. I think I might perhaps have written in the same way about Kamchatka, for that matter. Rather, I feel that regardless of what we think of all sorts of in themselves important questions in life, regarding child protection the central point is: Children need to be with THEIR OWN parents or other close relatives if AT ALL possible, in all kinds of societies.

Do not misunderstand me, folks: It is NOT possible if the parents ill-treat or abuse the child and cannot be trusted to stop.

In this case I agree that Astahov's hand is important and can only be positive.

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All the better if so, but not even that is the most decisive thing. – I remember a case about 20 years ago, it was something like this:

Some Cubans, a mother with a small son, got into a boat and headed for Miami, as refugees . The boat capsized and the boy was the only survivor. He was rescued by the American coast-guard and brought to some distant relatives of his in Miami. His father and mother had been divorced. The father had not objected to his son going with the mother, but now he of course wanted his son to return to himself. There was a lot of hullabaloo in Florida, which has a large community of Cubans hostile to communist Cuba, saying the boy must not be "victimised" by Cuba and "forced" to go back; the boy's relatives claimed to love him so very deeply (after having known him for a few weeks or even just a few days) that they could not do without him. Quite materialistic arguments (actually quite like a communistic way of thinking, Nemo?) about life and politics being so much better in the USA were very prominent - so many people shouting at the top of their lungs about how terrible it would be if the boy was going to go back to Cuba, that his father in Cuba was very poor, and his mother having wanted him to go to the USA, and Cuba being the big bad Satan.
    Cuba was not too fond of people escaping to the USA but they allowed the father to go peacefully and try to get his son back (the father was not an oppositional and it was positive advertisement for Cuba). The American social authorities kept him there for some little time, I think with the usual mumbo-jumbo which we know so well: they had to see whether the boy "could get used to him" etc. It ended with father and son going back to Cuba. – Which I think must have been the best thing. Even if the boy had not been living with his father before but with his mother, neither the political conditions nor a modest economic standard (as long as neither was an absolute, life-threatening disaster) should trump the principle of the boy being with his own parent.

The importance of the parent-child bond is what social services are taught to disrespect and forget, and so that is what we have to work to have reinstated.