Evidence of $26 million worth of war crimes committed by Russia in Ukraine may have been removed after the US stopped funding a team of Yale researchers that tracked thousands of Ukrainian children abducted by Russia, a source familiar with the program told Reuters.
A Yale University-based taskforce that helped locate hundreds of Ukrainian children abducted by Russia lost its government funding, following budget cuts by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), The Telegraph reported on 15 March.
Democratic lawmakers raised alarm over the Trump administration’s cancellation of the program. Run by Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab (Yale HRL), the programm monitored the mass deportation of approximately 30,000 Ukrainian children.
Its termination has reportedly resulted in researchers losing access to critical information, including satellite imagery and other data.
“We have reason to believe that the data from the repository has been permanently deleted. If true, this would have devastating consequences,” wrote Democratic lawmakers led by Representative Greg Landsman in a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
According to the source, they took $26 million of US taxpayers money used for war crimes data and “threw it into the woodchipper, including the dossiers on all the children.”
“If you wanted to protect President Putin from prosecution, you nuke that thing. And they did it,” it said.
The termination became public the same day Trump spoke by phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin. During this call, Russia did not agree to a 30-day cessation of hostilities, according to Reuters.
Ukraine has described the abductions as a war crime that meets the UN treaty definition of genocide.
The Ukrainian government has identified 20,000 children deported from Russian-held areas, with only 1,221 brought back home. Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine’s Human Rights Commissioner, said that the real figure is much higher, warning it can reach 150,000 minors.
Russia often masks the deportation of children as evacuation or recreational trips, taking them to isolated areas that prevent their return. There, Ukrainian children face forced assimilation and indoctrination, according to Alyona Luneva, advocacy director at the Zmina Human Rights Center.
The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova in March 2023 related to the abduction of Ukrainian children. Russia denounced these warrants as “outrageous and unacceptable.”
Reuters also reported that Eurojust, Europe’s agency for criminal cooperation, has been informed that Washington is ending support for the International Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine, which collected evidence to prosecute Putin and others.
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