The State Department has ended funds to track down the thousands of Ukrainian children accused of Russia, and American officials or contractors may have deleted a database containing information about them, according to a letter US lawmakers are due to send Wednesday to the Secretary of State.
Yale School of Public Health's aided children's work was frozen in late January when President Trump suspends almost all foreign aid spending and signs an executive order. Since then, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his subordinate staff, Pete Marrocco, have ended most of the foreign aid agreements, including those from Yale Labs.
A congressional letter hosted by Ohio Democratic leader Greg Lansman said: “The freeze on foreign aid is at stake and may ultimately eliminate Ukrainian information support on this aspect.”
The State Department and Yale Center “preserved evidence of a child adducted from Ukraine, which was obtained by the New York Times,” the letter said. Europol is the European Union's leading law enforcement agency.
“There's a reason to believe that data from the repository is permanently deleted.” “If that's the case, this will have devastating consequences. Please update us with the status of the data from the evidence repository.”
Those familiar with Yale Center's work said the details of the letter were accurate.
The Yale Institute was one of several recipients who received $26 million in parliamentary funding over three years through the State Department to track down war crimes committed by Russian troops in Ukraine. The work began in 2022 under a program called the Conflict Observatory.
The lab studied the accused children and the “filtration sites” that they and others were taken to in Russian-occupied Ukraine. Researchers used open source information and commercial satellite imagery.
Yale researchers were compiling a database called Caesar, allowing the State Department to share information about the accused children with Europol and the International Criminal Court. In 2022, after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. accused the Russians of committing “genocide.”
Ukrainian officials say Russia has accused 20,000 children from Ukraine. Yale researchers said in a previous report they tracked 30,000 children to sites outside of Ukraine. They put in their database information about 6,000 children brought to Russia, and 6,000 children that over 2,400 took to Belarus. The database provides detailed information about 314 tempted children in Russia. Their names and photos, and 20-30 pages of related documents for each child.
Some of the findings have been previously disclosed in a public report from Yale. The Centre also provided information about the children to the Ukrainian government.
The main contractor for the State Department project is Miter Corporation, a nonprofit organization that works primarily for the US government, including the Intelligence Reporting Agency. Yale Lab had a contract under it.
The State Department did not reply to requests for comment on the status of the project and database. Miter Corporation also did not reply.
In July 2023, Russian officials said Russia had brought 700,000 children to Russia from Ukraine's conflict zone.
Yale researchers have not been able to work on the project since the funding freeze began in late January. Yale researchers lost access to satellite images when the US government halted aid and sharing information with Ukraine after the Ukrainian president took over as president of Ukraine after the Ukrainian president beret Volodymie Zelensky on February 28th at the White House.
The Trump administration resumed intelligence sharing and arms aid following a Saudi Arabia meeting between us and Ukrainian officials this month. However, Yale researchers still have no access to satellite images.
Trump is trying to work with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, and the two spoke on the phone on Tuesday. Trump said he wanted to arrange a 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine, but Ukrainians agreed, but Putin said he would only temporarily stop the strike with energy infrastructure.
Details of the contract by the State Department for a contract regarding the potential investigation of Russian war crimes in Ukraine have been previously reported by the British news site, IPAper, the New Republic.
