Trump administration halts program to track abducted Ukrainian children, lawmakers say

By Patricia Zengerle

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Democratic U.S. lawmakers will call on President Donald Trump's administration to restore a program that helps track thousands of Ukrainian children abducted by Russia, and to use sanctions to punish those responsible for the rights violation.

As it slashes a wide range of U.S. government programs and most foreign aid, the Republican president's administration has ended a government-funded initiative led by Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab (Yale HRL) that tracked the mass deportation of children from Ukraine, the lawmakers said.

That decision meant researchers have lost access to a trove of information, including satellite imagery and other data, about some 30,000 children taken 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 Democratic lawmakers, led by Ohio Representative Greg Landsman, said in a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent seen by Reuters on Tuesday and due to be sent on Wednesday.

Trump's termination of the program and the letter were first reported in The Washington Post. It became public the same day that Trump spoke by telephone to Russian President Vladimir Putin in which Russia stopped short of agreeing to a 30-day cessation of hostilities.

The State and Treasury departments did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

A person familiar with the tracking program said the cancellation of the State Department contract with Yale HRL has resulted in the deletion of $26 million of war crimes evidence, which would help protect Putin.

"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 said.

"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 source said.

'EGREGIOUS, OPENLY ACKNOWLEDGED VIOLATIONS'

The House of Representatives members' letter also calls on the Trump administration to impose sanctions to punish officials in Russia and its ally Belarus involved in moving the children.

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

The letter also said Yale HRL no longer has access to the satellite imagery needed to track the movements of abducted children.

"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 lawmakers' letter said.

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

Russia has said it has been evacuating people voluntarily and to protect vulnerable children from the war zone.

In March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued warrants for the arrest of Lvova-Belova and Putin related to the abduction of Ukrainian children. Russia denounced the warrants as "outrageous and unacceptable."

A spokeswoman for Eurojust, Europe's agency for criminal cooperation, said on Tuesday it had been informed by Washington that it 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, among others.

The U.S. special prosecutor at Eurojust, Jessica Kim, would leave as part of the funding halt.

(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Additional reporting by Daphne Psaladekis in Washington and Anthony Deutsch in Amsterdam; editing by Bill Berkrot)