The State Department cut funding for a program that had been tracking tens of thousands of Ukrainian children who had been abducted from their homes and taken to Russia during the war, the department’s spokeswoman confirmed on Wednesday.
Tammy Bruce, the department’s top spokeswoman, indicated to reporters that the program, Yale’s School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab, was not aligned with the administration’s foreign policy plans and was cut, like several other related programs and grants.
“The funding has been cut based on the assessments that we’ve been making regarding a whole host of funding, if it worked within our framework of what was in America’s interest,” she said.
Russian forces have kidnapped more than 19,000 children from Ukraine, some of whom were orphaned during the war and brought back to Russia to be given to families there, according to Ukraine, and only about 1,200 have been returned.
The HRL has tracked more than 8,400 children from Ukraine who have been relocated to at least 57 facilities in Belarus, Russia, or Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories, the research lab has found.
“Well, I know that it was cut, and it was cut, as — the things that have been cut were not assessed to be within the framework of what mattered to this administration on the issue of making America safe and secure or more prosperous, but also it’s an issue about waste and abuse,” Bruce added. “So when we think about a particular effort, it’s important to realize that it’s the goal that we need to address, versus a particular structure that might be happening.”
She also disputed claims that the data the lab had accumulated were deleted.
President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke on Wednesday, a day after the U.S. leader spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump is looking to end the war, but it’s unclear what such a deal would look like that’s agreeable to both sides.
Trump and Zelensky spoke about the abducted children, and the president “promised to work closely” to ensure they are returned home.
Trump’s comments during the call, Bruce claimed, were “a pretty good, clear indication that we can still work on issues that matter and make them happen without it being in a certain structure that has existed.”
The International Criminal Court announced an arrest warrant for Putin and Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, the commissioner for children’s rights in the Office of the President of the Russian Federation, in March 2023, accusing them of being responsible for these child deportations, where they’ve undergone political reeducation training.
Yale’s HRL released a report last December that found Putin “intentionally and directly authorized” the abduction of children from Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts who were then placed in a “systematic program of coerced adoption and fostering.”
US TO WITHDRAW FROM BODY INVESTIGATING RUSSIAN RESPONSIBILITY FOR UKRAINE WAR
The court does not, however, conduct trials in absentia, meaning it’s unlikely Putin will ever face a trial.
Earlier this week, the United States withdrew its participation from the International Center for the Prosecution of the Crimes of Aggression against Ukraine, an entity designed to document and preserve evidence regarding the investigation into Russian leaders responsible for the invasion of Ukraine.
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