MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia has halted adoptions to US families after an American woman sent her adopted son back to Moscow on a plane with a note disowning him, the Foreign Ministry said yesterday.

Artyom Savelyev, 7, arrived alone at a Moscow airport last week with a typed letter asking the Russian government to annul the adoption on the grounds the child was mentally unstable.

President Dmitry Medvedev denounced the episode as a “monstrous deed” and the Foreign Ministry said on Thursday no further adoptions would be approved until a new agreement regulating the procedure is reached with US authorities.

“The future adoption of Russian children by American families, which has been halted, will only be possible if such an agreement is reached,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko told a briefing in Moscow.

Medvedev has called for an agreement setting out the duties of American parents in such cases and creating a system to monitor the treatment of the adopted children.

In Washington, the State Department said a US team would go to Russia next week to try to reach an understanding so that adoptions could continue.

“There are many loving families in the United States hoping to adopt children from Russia,” State Department spokesman PJ Crowley said. “It is in the interest of these children that our two countries reach a suitable arrangement that allows such adoptions to continue.”

Nesterenko said Artyom was being housed in a clinic in Moscow and that he was in good health.

Russia is the third largest source of foreign adoptions to the United States with 1,586 in 2009, according to the US State Department.

Russia tightened its adoption process after several Russian children died at the hands of abusive parents in the United States. The additional procedures caused a sharp fall in numbers of US adoptions from a peak of 5,862 in 2004.