The Trump administration discontinued a government-funded initiative led by the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab (Yale HRL), which tracked the mass deportation of children from Ukraine, writes The Washington Post. The lab began studying alleged Russian war crimes in May 2022. Yale University's work resulted in 13 public reports on Russia's actions during the invasion of Ukraine and contributed to six ICC indictments against Russian officials, including Putin. The closure of the program means the cessation of evidence transfer to prosecutors handling numerous criminal cases.
American Democratic lawmakers have urged the administration to restore the program that helps track thousands of Ukrainian children. Currently, researchers have lost access to a vast amount of information, including satellite images and biometric data, allowing them to identify and locate 35,000 children from Ukraine. “We have reason to believe that the data from the repository was permanently deleted,” warns a group of lawmakers in a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. “If true, this will have devastating consequences.” Furthermore, even if the database was not deleted but moved, its contents could now be compromised, and digital forensic evidence would be inadmissible in court.
A State Department spokesperson confirmed to Reuters that funding for the initiative has been discontinued but declined to comment on whether the data was deleted or compromised. “The Trump administration, through incompetence or intent, has called into question the credibility of war crimes evidence obtained over three years and $26 million,” says one of the project researchers.
A source familiar with the tracking program told the agency that the cancellation of the State Department contract with Yale HRL led to the deletion of $26 million worth of war crimes evidence, which could have helped prosecute Putin. “They took $26 million of American taxpayers' money used for collecting war crimes data and threw it into a woodchipper, including the dossiers on all the children,” the source said.