MOSCOW, May 20, 2006 (AFP) - Movie stars Sophia Loren and Jessica Lange appeared in Moscow Saturday to raise Russian awareness of orphans and sick children, warning of the stigmatisation of children who are HIV-positive.
"Nationwide, tremendous work has to be done for children, specifically for HIV positive children," said Hollywood star Lange, a goodwill ambassador for the United Nation's children's agency UNICEF.
"They are stigmatised," she told a press conference. "They have no possibility of being adopted, or to have equal education."
She and veteran Italian star Loren are here for a ceremony Sunday to award the Heart of Gold prize for charity works.
"If I can do something for those in need, I'm always ready to do so," Loren told journalists.
Money raised at the Heart of Gold ceremony and at a reception for Moscow's new money elite will go to help children in need of heart and brain operations.
Lange, who spent the last week visiting orphanages and centres for handicapped and HIV-positive children, said she was impressed by staff caring for orphans and sick children in centres supported by UNICEF.
The two stars, together with Hollywood actor Steven Seagal, were also scheduled Sunday to visit Moscow's Bakulev cardiac surgery unit, and distribute toys among sick children.
A 30-strong demonstration was held in the centre of Moscow on Friday in protest against the feared closure of an orphanage set up with funds provided by the jailed Russian multi-millionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whose assets have been seized.
Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man as head of the country's former leading oil producer Yukos, is serving eight years for embezzlement, massive fraud and tax evasion.
"The war by the state against Khodorkovsky is smashing the lives of orphaned children," one protest banner read.
Others denounced the alleged role of President Vladimir Putin in the prosecution of Khodorkovsky, saying: "Putin, you're fighting children, not an oligarch."
Oligarch was the term used to describe members of the new business class who surfaced afer the collapse of the Soviet Union and made quick fortunes from dubious privatisations in the 1990s.
Critics said the Khodorkovsky prosecution was a Krmelin-inspired move to regain state control over Yukos and curb its owner's political ambitions.
This month the Moscow prosecutor seized property at Koralovo near Moscow where Khodorkovsky set up a school in 1994. The seizure raised fears of the establishment being closed.
Currently it is home to 150 Russian youngsters, including orphans whose parents were killed in a bombing by political extremists in a Moscow theatre in 2002, and another in a school at Beslan in southern Russia in 2004.
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