Trump administration ends program to track kidnapped Ukrainian children in Russia, lawmakers say

The U.S. State Department has ended funding for tracking thousands of Ukrainian children abducted by Russia, and a U.S. database with information on the victims may have been deleted, according to a letter U.S. lawmakers plan to send to Trump administration officials on Wednesday.

A group of Democratic U.S. lawmakers penned the letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, urging the administration to restore the program that helps track the abducted Ukrainian children.

The administration has ended a government-funded initiative led by Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab that tracked the mass deportation of children from Ukraine, meaning researchers have lost access to a significant amount of information — including satellite imagery — on roughly 30,000 children kidnapped from Ukraine.

“We have reason to believe that the data from the repository has been permanently deleted. If true, this would have devastating consequences,” the letter, led by Ohio Rep. Greg Landsman, said.

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A group of Democratic U.S. lawmakers penned a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. (Reuters)

News of the letter came on Tuesday, the same day U.S. President Donald Trump spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who stopped short of agreeing to a 30-day truce in Moscow’s war against Ukraine.

A person familiar with the tracking program said the canceled State Department contract led to the deletion of $26 million in war crimes evidence.

“They took $26 million of U.S. taxpayers money used for war crimes data and threw it into the woodchipper, including the dossiers on all the children,” the person told Reuters.

“If you wanted to protect President Putin from prosecution, you nuke that thing. And they did it. It’s the final court-admissible version with all the metadata,” the person added.

The U.S. State Department has ended funding for tracking thousands of Ukrainian children abducted by Russia. (Celal Gunes/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

The letter to administration officials also calls for sanctions to punish officials in Russia and its ally Belarus who are involved in abducting children.

“These egregious, openly acknowledged violations of the rights of children afforded under international law demand consequences,” the letter said.

Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab also no longer has access to the satellite imagery needed to track the abducted children, according to the lawmakers.

“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,” the letter said.

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News of the letter came on Tuesday, the same day U.S. President Donald Trump spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Getty Images / Fox News Digital)

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Ukraine has described the abductions of tens of thousands of its children taken to Russia or Russian-occupied territory without parental consent as a war crime that meets the U.N. treaty definition of genocide.

Russia has claimed it has been evacuating people voluntarily to protect vulnerable children from being caught in the crossfire.

In March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued warrants for the arrest of Lvova-Belova and Putin in connection with the abduction of Ukrainian children, a move Russia denounced as “outrageous and unacceptable.”

Eurojust, Europe’s agency for criminal cooperation, said on Tuesday it learned the U.S. government was ending its support for the International Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine, which was collecting evidence to prosecute Putin and others. The U.S. special prosecutor at Eurojust, Jessica Kim, would leave as part of the move.

Reuters contributed to this report.