MOSCOW, March 28 - RAPSI. President Vladimir Putin has instructed the government and the Supreme Court to prepare amendments to the current adoption procedure to prohibit same-sex foreign couples from adopting Russian orphans, Izvestia newspaper writes.

The document will be most likely drafted by the Ministry of Education and Science, which is responsible for orphans.

The ministry told Izvestia that they had not yet received any instructions to this effect from the prime minister.

Children's rights commissioner Pavel Astakhov publicly expressed concern about Russian children adopted by same-sex couples. He promised to do his utmost to ensure that only traditional families are allowed to adopt Russian children.

Same-sex marriages are officially allowed in the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Canada, South Africa, Norway, Sweden, Portugal, Iceland, Argentina and Denmark.

The lower house of France's parliament, the National Assembly, passed a bill granting marriage and adoption rights to same-sex couples on February 13 this year.

As of 2011, the largest number of Russian children has been adopted by Spanish, French and Canadian nationals.

Earlier, Yekaterina Lakhova, who initiated the Dima Yakovlev law, proposed prohibiting LGBT couples from adopting Russian children and reviewing the Russian-French adoption agreement because France was considering granting marriage and adoption rights to same-sex couples.

The Dima Yakovlev law, which came into force on Jan. 1, bans the adoption of Russian children by US citizens.