The State Department has halted funding for a project tracking thousands of Ukrainian children abducted by Russia, and potentially deleted a crucial database of information on them, as stated in a letter set to be sent to Secretary of State Marco Rubio by U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday.

In late January, when President Trump signed an executive order to halt most foreign aid spending, the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab, which was working on identifying and documenting the abducted children, had its activities frozen. Consequently, Secretary of State Rubio and an undersecretary, Pete Marocco, have ended most foreign aid contracts, including the one to the Yale lab.

The congressional letter, spearheaded by Representative Greg Landsman, an Ohio Democrat, raises concerns that the stoppage of foreign aid funding jeopardizes and may ultimately eliminate informational support for Ukraine on this matter.

According to the letter, which was reviewed by The New York Times, “The State Department and the Yale center had been preserving evidence of abducted children from Ukraine… to be shared with Europol and the government of Ukraine to secure their return.” Europol is the law enforcement agency of the European Union.

The letter also expresses the possibility that the data from the repository may have been irreparably deleted, which would have severe consequences. It requests an update on the status of the evidence repository’s data.

A source familiar with the work of the Yale Center confirmed the information in the letter to be accurate. The Yale lab received $26 million in congressional funding over three years from the State Department to document war crimes by Russian forces in Ukraine, part of a program called the Conflict Observatory.

The lab utilized open-source information and commercial satellite imagery to research and gather data on the abducted children and “filtration sites” used in Russia-occupied Ukraine, where individuals were interrogated and prepared for deportation to Russia. Yale researchers were compiling the database, named Caesar, to enable the State Department to share information with Europol and the International Criminal Court, potentially leading to future charges against Russian officials.

Ukrainian officials claim that Russia has abducted as many as 20,000 Ukrainian children, while Yale researchers have documented the tracking of 30,000 children to locations outside of Ukraine.

The notified findings were already disclosed in public reports by Yale, which also provided the information to the Ukrainian government. The primary contractor for the State Department project was the MITRE Corporation, a nonprofit organization that performs significant work for the U.S. government. Neither the State Department nor the MITRE Corporation responded to comments about the project and database status.

In July 2023, a Russian official asserted that Russia had relocated 700,000 children from conflict zones in Ukraine to Russia.

Since the funding freeze in late January, the Yale researchers have been unable to work on the project. When the U.S. government halted arms aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine following a derogatory remark made by President Trump toward Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House on February 28, the Yale researchers also lost access to satellite imagery.

Intelligence sharing and weapons aid were reinstated after a meeting in Saudi Arabia this month between U.S. and Ukrainian officials. Despite this, the Yale researchers still do not have access to satellite images.

President Trump is reportedly attempting to align with Russia’s President Vladimir V. Putin, the two of whom spoke over the phone on Tuesday. Trump is advocating for a 30-day cease-fire in Ukraine, which Ukraine agreed to, but Putin stated he would only halt strikes temporarily on energy infrastructure.

Media outlets, including The i Paper, The New Republic, and The Washington Post, previously reported on the termination of State Department contracts for research on potential Russian war crimes in Ukraine and the details of the congressional draft letter.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/us/politics/trump-ukraine-abducted-children.html