The State Department stores information about Ukrainian children who were accused of by the Russian government during the war in Ukraine that lawmakers feared, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Thursday night.
Yale University researchers, who were tracking tens of thousands of aided Ukrainian children, created the database as a single project under the Biden Administration Department's Conflict Observation Program. In addition to tracking potential war crimes committed by Russia in Ukraine, the Conflict Observatory has tracked the civil war in Sudan. Lawmakers feared that the Ukrainian children's database would be deleted when the State Department cut funds for groups tracking aidductions.
“The data is safe,” Rubio told reporters on his plane flying from Suriname to Miami at the end of his tour of the Caribbean and South America. He said funds were cut as part of almost all foreign aid when President Trump took office in January, so he would be transferred to the “appropriate parties” without designating who. This data could be transferred to the International Criminal Court and Europol, the leading European law enforcement agencies.
Yale University Public Health and Humanitarian Laboratory, which had been tracking the abortion, had counted more than 30,000 children from Ukraine, including Russia and Belarus, from Ukraine, since the Russian full-scale Ukrainian invasion began in 2022. system.
Ukrainian officials say Russia has accused 20,000 children from the country.
In 2023, the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for Russian President Vladimir V. Putin and his aides, condemning war crimes against acquiring and deporting Ukrainian children. The Kremlin has denied accusations of war crimes, but it has not been a secret about the relocation of Ukrainian children to Russia.
Yale Lab intended to hand over the database to Europole and the International Criminal Court. In addition to Putin's arrest warrant for deportation, the court issued it for his aide Maria Lvova Belova. The purpose of the database is to help courts raise charges against more Russian officials.
This month, a US lawmaker asked Rubio about the project's status and said he heard he heard the database was deleted after funding was suspended.
The conflict observation program, which Yale Lab collaborated with, is to remain operational for six weeks to give experts time to transfer the database.
The main contractor for the program was Miter Corporation, a nonprofit that often functions in the US intelligence reporting agency. Yale Lab was a subcontractor under Miter. Congress has allocated funding for the project this year since 2022.
After lawmakers expressed concern about the database, Miter said in a statement that it had not been deleted and was in the hands of another group of experts.
