The 2018 World Cup in Russia kicks off Thursday, and while most of us will be focused on cheering for our favorite teams, local women are being advised to keep something else in mind: don’t have sex with foreigners.
This warning comes from Russian lawmaker Tamara Pletnyova, according to RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty. Pletnyova’s fear stems from a group of single mothers raising children conceived during the 1980 Olympic Games held in Moscow during the era of the Soviet Union. "These children suffer and have suffered, even since Soviet times," she said in comments published by Govorit Moskva.
The World Cup will be a month-long extravaganza taking place in several cities. FIFA has confirmed that 2.4 million tickets have already been sold, as people from all over the world plan to attend the 64-match tournament.
Pletnyova concedes that if Russian women simply can’t control themselves, they should at least have sex with visitors of the same race. "If it's another race, then it's even worse," the member of the Communist Party said. "We should give birth to our own children. I'm not a nationalist, but nonetheless. I know that the children suffer as well, and then they are abandoned and stay here with the mother."
She warns that even if these women plan on marrying their foreign baby daddy, their child could end up stuck in another country with no means of getting back to Russia. "Then they come to me at the committee and cry that the child was taken away, removed, and so forth,” Pletnyova said. “I would like people to get married based on love in our country, regardless of which ethnicity, [to] Russian citizens who would build a good family, live in harmony, have children, and raise them.”
Unsurprisingly this lawmaker has made similarly prudish comments before, once criticizing the crop top of a local journalist. "I would like to say that these girl journalists should look more decent, put clothes on themselves when entering a state building, instead of having their belly buttons naked," Pletnyova said during an interview with Ekho Moskvy radio.
