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Rubio confirms US halts program tracking 30,000 Ukrainian children abducted by Russia

Yale researchers’ database documenting Russia’s systematic deportation of Ukrainian children will be transferred to international authorities as Trump administration terminates nearly all foreign aid programs.
byOlena Mukhina
30/03/2025
3 minute read
Russian-abducted Ukrainian children/open source
Russian-abducted Ukrainian children. Credit: Open Source
Rubio confirms US halts program tracking 30,000 Ukrainian children abducted by Russia

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio says that the program to find Ukrainian children illegally taken from Ukraine by Russia has not been resumed.

In mid-March, The Washington Post reported that the Trump administration shut down the Conflict Observatory initiative, which monitored the mass deportation of Ukrainian children. The program was funded by the US government and led by Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab.

According to Rubio, the US State Department has retained information on Ukrainian children abducted by the Russian government during the war in Ukraine, despite lawmakers’ fears that it had been deleted.

Researchers from Yale University, who tracked tens of thousands of kidnapped Ukrainian children, had created a database as part of a project under the State Department’s Conflict Observatory program during the Biden administration.

Russia’s systematic kidnapping of Ukrainian children is part of a broader strategy aimed at erasing Ukrainian identity and culture, and undermining the nation’s future. This campaign involves forcibly relocating children from Ukraine to Russia, where they are subjected to “re-education” and forced assimilation, often through adoption into Russian families.

Lawmakers feared that this database had been erased when the State Department ended funding for the group monitoring the abductions, according to The New York Times.

Rubio stated that the database will be transferred to the “appropriate party,” though he did not specify whom. He also confirmed that the program will not resume, as funding was cut when US President Trump took office in January, ending nearly all foreign aid.

The data will likely be sent to the International Criminal Court and Europol, Europe’s main law enforcement agency.

Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab, which tracked the abductions, has documented over 30,000 children taken from Ukraine to Russia and Belarus since Russia’s all-out war began in 2022.

In 2023, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova, accusing them of war crimes related to the abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children. The Kremlin denies committing war crimes but does not conceal the fact that Ukrainian children have been relocated to Russia.

A few months later, a Russian official stated that Russia had taken 700,000 children from war zones in Ukraine.

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