I'm going to rant here a little bit.
Victor submitted our dossier to the State Department of Adoptions (SDA) today. With the ban on Russian adoptions, Ukraine is seeing a lot more dossiers, and the SDA is being very picky about the paperwork, rejecting about 40% of the dossiers submitted. With this in mind, Victor has been going over our paperwork with a fine toothed comb and having us make changes that seem insignificant to us. Finally, after several adjustments, Victor took our dossier to the SDA. When he submitted it, he said the SDA official really didn't like our OSBI police clearance form. It has all of the correct information, but we paid the fee to the OSBI by credit card. Our credit card number was on the form, so the OSBI official used a Sharpie to hide our credit card information. The SDA doesn't like the black mark, and our dossier may be rejected.
Wait, it gets worse. If our dossier is rejected, the SDA will keep several of the forms. In order to re-submit our dossier, we will need to gather new copies of these official documents and have them notarized and apostilled. This will take lots of time.
Our dossier has not yet been rejected so I reserve the right to retract my rant. Ukraine claims it wants to keep orphaned siblings together. This is why "breaking the family," legally separating Eli and Isaac from Sasha, was so difficult and time-consuming when we spent our nine weeks in Ukraine last year. But hadn't the system already "broken the family" when they moved the brothers to separate orphanages years ago? Where was the outcry about that? The Ukrainian government can separate siblings as they see fit, but if foreigners come in and want to adopt one or two of those siblings, NOOOOO, you can't break the family! So now, we want to reunite these brothers, which is what the government claims is its ultimate goal, and they are going to reject our petition because our credit card information is crossed off on one of the dozens of documents they require. Absurd.
