The U.S. State Department has ended funds for tracking thousands of Ukrainian children kidnapped by Russia and may have deleted information about the victims, according to a U.S. lawmaker plan to send to Trump administration officials on Wednesday.
A group of Democratic U.S. lawmakers write to Secretary of State Marco Rubio Finance Minister Scott Bessent urged the government to resume the program to help track kidnapped Ukrainian children.
The government ended a government-funded initiative led by Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Laboratory, which tracks mass deportations of children in Ukraine, meaning researchers have lost a lot of information (including satellite images) among about 30,000 children kidnapped by Ukraine.
“We have reason to believe that the data in the repository has been permanently deleted. If so, this will have devastating consequences.”
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A group of Democratic U.S. lawmakers wrote to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Besent. (Reuters)
The letter was reported on Tuesday, the same day when U.S. President Donald Trump spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was reluctant to agree to a 30-day ceasefire in Moscow. War against Ukraine.
A person familiar with the stalking plan said the cancelled State Department contract resulted in the removal of $26 million in evidence of war crimes.
“They spent $26 million on war crime data and threw it into the carpenters, including all the children’s files,” the person told Reuters.
The person added: “If you want to protect President Putin from prosecution, you did it. They did it. This is the ultimate court-allowed version that includes all the metadata.”
The U.S. State Department has ended funds to track thousands of Ukrainian children kidnapped by Russia. (Celal Gunes/Anadolu Agent/Getty Images)
The letter to government officials also calls for sanctions against officials from Russia and its ally Belarus and to participate in the kidnapping of children.
“These serious, publicly recognized violations of the children’s rights that require consequences for international law,” the letter said.
According to lawmakers, Yale’s Humanitarian Research Laboratory no longer has access to satellite images needed to track kidnapped children.
“Our government is providing a basic service – a service that does not require transfer of weapons or cash to Ukraine – in pursuit of the lofty goal of saving these children. We must resume work immediately to help Ukraine bring these children home.”
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The news for the letter was Tuesday, the same day when U.S. President Donald Trump spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Getty Images/Fox News Numbers)
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Ukraine describes kidnapping of thousands of children Bring to Russia Or Russian occupation of territory without parental consent is a war crime in line with the definition of the United Nations treaty on genocide.
Russia claims it has been voluntarily evacuating people to protect vulnerable children from being trapped by firefighting.
In March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for the arrest of Lvova-Belova and Putin in connection with the kidnapping of Ukrainian children, and Russia condemned Russia for being “outrageous and unacceptable.”
Eurojust, a European criminal cooperation agency, said Tuesday that the U.S. government is ending support for international aggression crimes against Ukraine, and the center is collecting evidence to prosecute Putin and others. Eurojust’s U.S. Special Attorney Jessica Kim will leave as part of the move.
Reuters contributed to the report.
