Trump funding cut ‘risks Ukraine's abducted children disappearing forever'

Telegraph

24-06-2025

Examining Russian adoption databases, a team of analysts identified 314 stolen Ukrainian children, listed as Russian citizens with different names.
Without that intelligence, those children might have fallen into the deep cracks of Moscow's scheme to 'Russify' Ukraine's children, lost forever in a state-sponsored effort to conceal their identities.
The work of the Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) at Yale University represents the most extensive public effort at documenting Russia's war crimes, especially its large-scale abduction of Ukrainian children.
However, as of July 1, its whole operation will be shut down after the Trump administration withdrew its funding.
Nathaniel Raymond, the executive director of the research lab, said the stakes could not be higher.
He said: 'We are academic researchers going head-to-head with Russia's FSB and battling with the most amount of missing children since the Second World War.
'Yet, we don't know if we will survive the month.'
The Ukraine Conflict Observatory, an effort led by the HRL, had been tracking 35,000 children who were forcibly deported from Ukraine, funnelled into re-education camps or adopted by Russian families. Often their identities have been erased.
Ukraine, in comparison, has officially identified 19,546 children, calling the abductions a war crime that meets the UN treaty definition of genocide.
The true number, estimates suggest, could range from 260,000 to 700,000. Only 1,366 children have been returned from deportation so far.
Bill Van Esveld, the associate director of the children's rights division at Human Rights Watch, said: 'It's a scandal that the lab is scrambling to be able to continue its work when there is no other source of information about so many Ukrainian kids that could help bring them home.'
He said that since day one of the war, the Yale lab has played an 'irreplaceable role'.
Launched in 2022, with $6 million in federal funding, the lab has excelled in using open-source intelligence – including satellite imagery, phone data and social media, to track the movements of illegally deported children and preserve critical evidence of war crimes.
Its work helped catalyse six International Criminal Court indictments against Russia, including two related to the abduction of children that led to arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, his children's rights commissioner
Cut off from own database
In February, the department of government efficiency (Doge) – then headed by Elon Musk – terminated its funding without explanation and cut off the task force from its own database.
After the move drew outrage, HRL was granted a temporary extension to transfer all its vital repository to Europol and the Ukrainian government, which is now due to expire.
US officials warn that the data will quickly become out-of-date, spelling a disaster for efforts to find the children and document the efforts against them.
The weight of that responsibility hangs heavy on Mr Raymond, who is in disbelief that Kyiv's allies, including the UK, have not stepped up to ensure the lab's survival.
'It is just us and then Ukrainian bodies – there are no other major efforts tracking the children,' he said.
Earlier this month, 30 members of Congress sent a letter to Marco Rubio, US secretary of state, urging the administration to maintain the funding for the lab.
The letter stated: 'No explanation has been given to us as to why funding for the Conflict Observatory has been terminated.'
It argued that its work 'cannot be replaced by Europol or other organisations'.
Congressional aides told CNN that the state department had planned to allocate $8 million to HRL for 2025. Lawmakers are now questioning where that money went.
Doug Klain, an analyst at Razom for Ukraine, a US-based humanitarian aid and advocacy organisation, said: 'This was absolutely not an arbitrary decision.'
He argued that the lab was specifically targeted as part of the Trump administration's unwinding of its efforts to investigate Russian war crimes.
In March, the US government withdrew from a multinational group meant to investigate leaders responsible for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, including Putin. It also reduced the work of the justice department's War Crimes Accountability Team and dismantled a program to seize assets of sanctioned Russian oligarchs, The Washington Post reported.
Mr Klain added: 'The Trump administration seemingly decided that refusing to hold Russia accountable would make it more likely Putin would agree to a ceasefire. In reality, we've just seen Putin attack Ukrainian civilians with even greater impunity.'
With Washington allegedly turning away from the issue, the HRL's work takes on new importance.
In 2023, the HRL identified a network of 43 re-education camps and facilities across 21 Russian regions where abducted Ukrainian children are being held. It also exposed Belarus' role in the deportation campaign, confirming 13 locations there.
The lab estimates that there are at least 116 locations, including family centres, so-called summer camps, hospitals, converted military facilities and even buildings owned by the president's office.
Mr Raymond said: 'It is a massive gulag system stretching from the Black Sea to the Pacific that is run systematically by Russia's government and could hold up to hundreds of thousands of children.'
The majority of camps engage in re-education, often pressuring children to give up their Ukrainian identity, while others provide military training and prevent their return home – violating international human rights law.
'Constant game of cat and mouse'
The work to identify the children is delicate and painstaking.
'It is a constant game of cat and mouse,' Mr Raymond said. If Russia's security services sense that HRL or other organisations may be on their tail, the databases are deleted, the children might be moved again and have their names changed.
Time is also running out. 'The longer these children remain under Russian control, the more likely it is that they will be lost – not only physically, but in terms of who they are and where they belong,' said Mykola Kuleba, the co-founder of Save Ukraine, a non-profit that organises rescue missions to return deported children.
He told The Telegraph: 'This is not just a humanitarian crisis. It is a crime with generational consequences.' He emphasised how 'invaluable' the work of the lab has been to put the plight of Ukraine's children 'at the forefront of many states' political agendas'.
The worst-case scenario is that these children could then be sent to the front line.
There is widespread evidence that part of the children's indoctrination involves forced militarisation for Russia 'to prepare future soldiers to fight against their own country', according to Vladyslav Havrylov, a fellow with the Collaborative on Global Children's Issues at Georgetown University.
There are also 1.6 million Ukrainian children living under Russian occupation who, Mr Havrylov said, 'are all at danger of being deported'. An independent report earlier this month revealed that the children are already being forced into militarised camps and programmes to be indoctrinated.
Identifying and tracing Ukraine's missing children is also central to its broader struggle for justice at future peace negotiations.
Without their names Ukraine cannot demand their return from Russia and hold it accountable for their abduction.
At the direct talks in Istanbul at the start of June, Ukraine handed Russia a list of 339 children to return home first as a mark of 'good faith' for the peace negotiations. That list is believed to have been heavily influenced by the HRL's work.
Mr Raymond said: 'These are the hardest to find, hardest to return children who have been listed on adoption websites.'
Volodymyr Zelensky said the Russian side denied abducting at least 20,000 children and insisted that the number was merely 'hundreds'. Russia on Thursday announced that it would return five of those on the list.
'The world just did not care'
The HRL's state funding dried up mid-June. Now, it is limping along, relying on individual donations to keep it going until July 1. There is a small sliver of hope that enough donations will allow it to survive a month longer.
Mr Raymond questioned why there has been no mass mobilisation around the issue of Ukraine's stolen children and how, in turn, the lab has found itself shuttered.
He said: 'It shows the world just did not care enough.
'This is a Dunkirk moment. If we don't survive, it means that no one is helping Ukraine to look for the kids and those children are left alone to fend for themselves.
'We wait for rescue, so we can get back in the fight.'