The Trump administration has shut down a program that tracked Ukrainian children taken by Russia, leading to concerns about lost evidence and accountability.
The initiative, led by Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab (Yale HRL), monitored the deportation of thousands of Ukrainian children. Its termination has cut off access to critical data, including satellite imagery, on approximately 30,000 children taken from Ukraine.
"We have reason to believe that the data from the repository has been permanently deleted. If true, this would have devastating consequences," wrote a group of Democratic lawmakers, led by Ohio Representative Greg Landsman, in a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. The letter, obtained by Reuters, is set to be sent on Wednesday.
The termination of the program was first reported by The Washington Post. The news coincided with a phone call between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
A source familiar with the program said canceling the State Department contract with Yale HRL resulted in the loss of $26 million worth of war crimes evidence. "They took $26 million of US taxpayers’ money used for war crimes data and threw it into the woodchipper, including the dossiers on all the children," the person said.
Ukraine has called the forced deportations of its children a war crime that fits the UN treaty definition of genocide. Russia, however, claims it is evacuating children for their protection.
In March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, over the abduction of Ukrainian children. Moscow dismissed the warrants as “outrageous and unacceptable.”
Meanwhile, Eurojust, the European agency for criminal cooperation, confirmed on Tuesday that Washington has pulled support for the International Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine, which had been collecting evidence to prosecute Putin and other Russian officials, reports Kyiv Post.
