Ruslan Pettyjohn lives in a home with a pool, plays on a soccer team, goes bike-riding with friends and has doting parents. He seems to have everything a 13-year-old American boy would want. Except his big sister, Olga.

When Ruslan was adopted from Russia nearly four years ago, she was left behind in their village, sweeping floors and living in a condemned building with broken windows and no running water. She had looked after him for years in the orphanage after their birth mother died. To give him a better life, she signed off on his adoption.

As international adoptions have soared, U.S. parents are dealing with an unintended consequence: siblings separated. More are searching for their children's biological relatives, hoping to help them reconnect with their roots. Some want to adopt the kin; others just want to visit.

Now families are working together to seek a U.S. immigration fix, such as a visitor program that would allow brothers and sisters to see each other. They're getting help from Empire Bay Group, a Washington consulting firm.

"We're committed to creating a path" for relatives to come to the United States, says Joan Knipe, Ruslan's adoptive mother. She and her husband, Steve Pettyjohn, of Scottsdale, Ariz., didn't know about Olga Lukinova until Ruslan's adoption was nearly complete. He didn't speak English, so he couldn't tell them.

RULES DON'T HELP

They tried to adopt Olga, but so far she has been denied visas. She lacks the formal schooling to qualify for a student visa and the financial assets for a tourist visa. Now they seek special permission because they're running out of time. For her to be adopted, Arizona state law requires her to enter the United States by her 22nd birthday, May 25.

"She doesn't know how to ride a bike. I could teach her," says blue-eyed Ruslan, who clings to pictures of Olga when his mother reads "Harry Potter" to him at bedtime.

To help other families in a similar plight, Knipe last year founded Save Orphaned Siblings, a nonprofit group that has attracted about 50 families with children adopted from Russia.

"We're just a group of moms who want to get some laws changed," says Johanna Babcock, a kindergarten teacher who adopted two boys from Russia. "We want to get these kids here."

Her younger son, Sergei, 8, adopted at 2, has two teenage sisters in Russia. She found out about them when she got his final adoption papers and tracked them down.

"I felt when I met these girls, they are the missing piece," she says. "My boys don't understand why they're not here."

NEW CATEGORY NEEDED

Obstacles remain. Many say they can't get visas for relatives to visit the United States because relatives often don't have enough assets to assure authorities they'll return to Russia.

"Congress didn't create any special category" for adopter's relatives, says Tony Edson, deputy assistant secretary for visa services at the State Department. An application to adopt an orphan from another country must be filed by the time the child is 16 unless a younger sibling has already been adopted, in which case the age limit is 18. Once here, foreigners may be adopted as adults, depending on each state's law.

Another obstacle is a new Russian process for accrediting adoption agencies that has left most American agencies waiting for approval to be able to send orphans here, says Thomas Atwood, president of the National Council for Adoption. He says the Russian government has been restricting international adoption, prompted partly by the few but horrific cases of Russian kids adopted by Americans who later abused them.

The number of U.S. adoptions from Russia rose dramatically between 1992 and 2004 but has since fallen markedly.

Legal obstacles have left the Pettyjohns desperate. They're requesting a special kind of visa, known as "humanitarian parole," that the Department of Homeland Security grants in rare cases for a "very compelling emergency," such as medical treatment. The first application was rejected; they're filing another.

"I do believe this is life or death," says Knipe, a director at Caremark, a pharmaceutical firm. She says Olga has been sick twice this year with respiratory infections, and is so thin that size 0 pants are baggy.

When Knipe mails Olga clothes or English-language tapes, they're stolen, Knipe says. She is careful not to send much money: Olga could be a target of thieves. She wants to educate Olga and give her a family. Olga's mother died at 33, and Knipe doesn't know what happened to the father. Two other brothers were adopted by a relative and stayed together.

CRUELTY AND NEGLECT

Russian orphans are exposed to "shocking levels of cruelty and neglect" and carry a lifelong stigma that results in many ending up homeless, according to a Human Rights Watch report in 1998. The report says 95 percent of children in orphanages have a living parent, but many families are too poor or abusive to take care of their kids.

Jane Aronson, a pediatrician who has visited orphanages in many countries and runs the nonprofit Worldwide Orphans Foundation, says re-establishing sibling ties makes "a huge difference" for adopted kids, who often struggle with questions about their birth parents.

"The more adoptees are connected to their roots, the better they are," says Aronson, who adopted a boy from Ethiopia and another from Vietnam. "Every parent who adopts feels guilty about a child left behind."

A NEW SENSITIVITY

There has been a growing sensitivity to keeping siblings together, says Barbara Holton, project manager of Adopt US Kids: "Brothers and sisters who've lost everything don't need to lose each other as well."

Still, re-establishing such ties is not for the faint of heart, Holton says.

"It's fraught with potential pitfalls," she says, including the possibility that the adoptive parents could get scammed.

Ronald Federici, a neuropsychologist and author of "Help for the Hopeless Child," says he has seen too many naive American parents being extorted for money by the relatives of their adopted children.

"The majority of the cases I've dealt with have been disasters," he says. In some cases, he says, the adoptees are traumatized again when they find out their siblings are living on the street or their birth mother doesn't want to see them.