The Trump administration has jeopardized efforts to find thousands of Ukrainian children illegally deported to Russia and Belarus, and in doing so, may have compromised evidence of war crimes by Russian officials.
After the US State Department funded Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab in 2022 to work on Ukraine, the lab exposed the scope of Russian deportation of children from occupied areas of Ukraine, a war crime. The lab documented the complicity of Russian and Belarusian officials at all levels and tracked thousands of children whose identities and whereabouts Russia refuses to share.
Human Rights Watch independently documented how some of these children were taken from Ukrainian residential institutions in occupied areas. Families did not consent to hostile occupying forces whisking away their children forever. Russian officials subjected the children to anti-Ukraine indoctrination, military training, and punishment for questioning the war.
The Yale lab unearthed data about the children, who were sent to dozens of residential institutions across Russia. It spotted some children’s names listed on Russian fostering and adoption databases, without their country of origin and with Russian nationality assigned to them. It was actively tracking thousands of children’s locations, a team member told Human Rights Watch.
The Trump administration’s budget cuts stopped the lab’s work. But that’s not all.
Under its contract with the lab, the US government is responsible for the lab’s database. When the government cut off its support, the lab’s team members lost access to the irreplaceable data they had collected.
That data included evidence of war crimes, scrupulously stored and safeguarded by the lab. With US authorization, the lab shared some – but not all – of this evidence with European authorities and the International Criminal Court (ICC), which issued arrest warrants for Putin and another Russian official for deporting Ukrainian children.
A March 19 congressional letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, spearheaded by Congressperson Greg Landsman, expressed concern that the US may have deleted the database.
The State Department denied this, but the US has not informed the lab how or where it is storing the information.
This is a potential disaster for efforts to find the children and for justice for crimes against them.
On March 20, US President Donald Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy about the deported children and promised “to help make sure they were returned home.”
Congress should press Rubio to confirm the integrity and security of the data, and to restore the lab’s access to the data, as well as funding, so it can continue its essential work for justice and find and repatriate abducted Ukrainian children.
