Group tracking Russian abductions of Ukrainian children prepares to shut down following Trump admin funding cut

The preeminent body tracking alleged Russian war crimes in the war with Ukraine, including the abduction of Ukrainian children, has transferred its data to Ukraine’s government and the US State Department as it prepares to shut down in the coming weeks after the Trump administration terminated its funding.

The preeminent body tracking alleged Russian war crimes in the war with Ukraine, including the abduction of Ukrainian children, has transferred its data to Ukraine’s government and the US State Department as it prepares to shut down in the coming weeks after the Trump administration terminated its funding. “Right now, we are running on fumes, we have about two weeks of money left, mostly through individual donations from our website. As of July 1, we lay off all of our staff across Ukraine and other teams and our work tracking the kids officially ends. We are waiting for our Dunkirk moment, for someone to come rescue us so that we can go attempt to help rescue the kids,” Nathaniel Raymond, the Executive Director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, told CNN. The Ukraine Conflict Observatory, an effort led by Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab, has collected more than three years of data following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with the backing of State Department funding. The effort was launched in May 2022 “to capture, analyze, and make widely available evidence of Russia-perpetrated war crimes and other atrocities in Ukraine.” The database currently includes the information and identities of over 30,000 Ukrainian children who were allegedly abducted by Russia across 100 locations, explained a source familiar with the data. The initiative’s closure will leave a major blind spot because no other body has so closely tracked the abduction of Ukrainian children. The lab’s work has supported six International Criminal Court indictments against Russia, including two related to the abduction of children, Raymond said. Earlier this year, the effort’s funding was cut off as part of Department of Government Efficiency cuts, which resulted in researchers at Yale losing access to the database. But the funding was reinstated for a short time by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to ensure that the data was transferred to the European Union’s law enforcement agency, Europol, so that it could be used as evidence in future war crimes cases.