Vladimir Putin greeted the Magnitsky Act with outrage, indignation, and derision. After all, he stated in an interview, people die in prisons all the time. What was the big deal about Magnitsky? He was already upset that American officials had allegedly interfered in the Russian election process by encouraging anti-Putin demonstrations, thus calling the legitimacy of his election to the Presidency in March 2012 into question. And now he was insulted that loyal members of his administration were criminalized by the Magnitsky Act and limited in their dealings with the West. (The European Parliament adopted a version of the Magnitsky Act in April 2014).

The only way Moscow could think of retaliating was to ban the widespread adoption of Russian children by American couples in December 2012, pointing to the death of an adopted Russian child, Dimitrii Yakovlev, who had been abused by his American parents and died while being left alone in an overheated automobile in 2012. In April 2013, the Russian government also placed 18 Americans on a list of alleged human rights violators who were banned from Russia.

The Magnitsky Law and the Russian outraged reaction to it were nails in the coffin of Obama's "reset." Despite some very modest accomplishments at the outset of the Obama administration, Russian-American relations have been at a relatively low point ever since. Sanctions that were added to the Magnitsky restrictions as a consequence of Putin's annexation of the Crimea in March 2014 and the poorly disguised Russian intervention in Donetsk and Luhansk (in eastern Ukraine) in the months and years thereafter have created the impression in some parts of international society that Russia is an "outlaw" state and Putin a criminal ruler. This runs directly counter to Putin's image of himself and of the country whose interests he claims to defend.

It is no wonder that the issues of the Magnitsky Act and the ban on American adoptions were brought up in conversations between the highly placed Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and the Trump campaign. These insults to Putin's sense of national honor remain a very tender spot in the seemingly impervious exterior of the Russian dictator.