Feds End Project Tracking Kidnapped Ukrainian Kids

Funding for a project to track Russian war crimes in Ukraine—including the kidnapping of tens of thousands of children—was abruptly cut off by the Trump administration last month, and lawmakers worry that the data has been lost. In a Tuesday letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a bipartisan group of 17 lawmakers expressed concern that a database tracking more than 30,000 abducted children may have been deleted, the New York Times reports.

• The lawmakers said the State Department and Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab "had been preserving evidence of abducted children from Ukraine it had identified, to be shared with Europol and the government of Ukraine to secure their return."

• The work was part of the Ukraine Conflict Observatory initiative launched by the State Department in 2022 to track Russian war crimes. "The funding has been cut based on the assessments that we've been making regarding what was defining work within our framework of what was in America's interests," State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said Wednesday, per CNN. Funding was formally cut last month, but the Yale researchers have reportedly been unable to access the data since a freeze in foreign aid was announced days after Trump took office.
• After the Times' story was published, the State Department said it did not hold the Conflict Observatory's data. The department referred questions to a nonprofit contractor, the MITRE Corporation, which said that as far as it knows "the research data that was compiled has not been deleted and is currently maintained by a former partner on this contract."

• Lawmakers say that even if the database has been moved, not deleted, its contents may have been compromised, making it inadmissible as evidence in efforts to prosecute those responsible for the abductions. "The Trump administration, through either its incompetence or its intent, has now cast doubt on the validity of three years and $26 million of taxpayer-funded war crimes evidence," a researcher speaking on condition of anonymity tells the Washington Post.
• "Surrender on this front will result in the total abandonment of at least 30,000 innocent children from Ukraine," lawmakers wrote in the letter to Rubio and Bessent. "Our government is providing an essential service— one that does not require the transfer of weapons or cash to Ukraine—in pursuit of the noble goal of rescuing these children. We must, immediately, resume the work to help Ukraine bring these children home."

(More Russia-Ukraine war stories.)