MOSCOW, January 23 - RAPSI. US Ambassador Michael McFaul has announced that Washington will continue to honor its agreements and commitments to Russia, including the bilateral consular convention of 1964, which gives Russian diplomats unrestricted access to Russian nationals in the US, including to adopted children.

According to McFaul, the US administration will continue its adoption agreement with Russia until its expiry on January 1, 2014, although Russia has denounced it. The ambassador added that Russia can only blame itself for losing the new opportunities to monitor the lives of adopted children set out in the agreement.

Replying to questions via his Twitter account, the ambassador said that Russia lost the opportunity to monitor the fate of orphans already living in America after the Dima Yakovlev law came into force on January 1, 2013. In response, Konstantin Dolgov, the Russian Foreign Ministry's Commissioner for Human Rights, Democracy and Rule of Law, told the ambassador that he is grossly distorting facts by "neglecting to mention" the 1964 consular convention.

The bill that bans the US adoption of Russian children was approved in response to the Magnitsky Act and came into force on January 1. It was unofficially named in memory of Dima Yakovlev, the two-year-old Russian boy who died after his US adoptive father left him in the car for nine hours on a hot summer day.