The Trump administration has distanced itself from the previous administration’s leading role in the international community’s effort to document and preserve evidence of alleged Russian war crimes in Ukraine.
The United States withdrew from an international body designed to document and preserve evidence for any future prosecutions for the crime of aggression against Russian leaders. Also, the State Department confirmed last week that it stopped funding a Yale University lab that had been tracking and documenting thousands of Ukrainian children who have been forcibly taken from their homes, transported to Russia, reeducated, and “adopted.”
The broader efforts won’t stop because the U.S. pulled its support, but it will have an impact nonetheless.
“The Ukrainian teams, the investigative teams, and the teams focused on the issue of children, they have a special team. They’re extremely capable, and I know that some of that information was already shared with them, and so they may be able to pick some of this up on their own,” Beth Van Schaack, who served as ambassador-at-large for Global Criminal Justice during the last administration, told the Washington Examiner.
“But what was really special about that Yale team was their ability to do absolutely state-of-the-art open-source research, tracking these children by searching the internet for evidence of where they’ve gone, using facial recognition software, whatever they’re able to use in order to see, track busloads of children,” she added.
State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said last week that funding for the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab “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 interests.”
The forcible deportation and indoctrination of thousands of Ukrainian children was the basis for the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, the commissioner for children’s rights in the Office of the President of the Russian Federation, in March 2023.
Following the announcement of the warrant, then-President Joe Biden said, “He’s clearly committed war crimes.”
Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke last week to discuss Trump’s call with Putin, and according to national security adviser Mike Waltz and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the president asked “about the children who had gone missing from Ukraine during the war, including the ones that had been abducted.” They said, “President Trump promised to work closely with both parties to help make sure those children were returned home.”
A State Department spokesperson pointed the Washington Examiner to Trump’s question about the abducted children when asked for comment about the decision to stop funding the Yale lab.
A bipartisan group of senators reached out to Rubio, expressing concern over the decision and seeking an explanation.
Six senators — Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Chris Coons (D-DE), Thom Tillis (R-NC), and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) — signed onto the letter, which asked for an explanation for the “decision-making procedure and justification” for deciding to cut funding for the research lab and urged them to “immediately resume U.S. support for this critical work.”
Russian forces have been accused of executing civilians and committing sexual violence and torture, in addition to the forcible deportation of children. Many of the alleged war crimes took place in Ukrainian cities and were only uncovered once Ukraine regained territory previously occupied by Russian forces.
United Nations investigators documented in September 2022 a “large number of executions” in 16 towns in which there was a pattern of “visible signs of executions on bodies, such as hands tied behind backs, gunshot wounds to the head, and slit throats.”
The U.S. Department of Justice filed charges against four Russian-affiliated soldiers in December 2023 who allegedly committed war crimes against an American citizen in Russian-occupied Ukraine. The indictment alleges the Russian soldiers who detained him repeatedly beat him, threatened to assault and kill him, and had a gun put to the back of his head.
This was the first time the DOJ used the war crimes statute, which was passed nearly 30 years ago and made it a crime to subject an American to torture or inhumane treatment during a war.
“As the world has witnessed the horrors of Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, so has the United States Department of Justice,” then-Attorney General Merrick Garland said at the time. “That is why the Justice Department has filed the first-ever charges under the U.S. war crimes statute against four Russia-affiliated military personnel for heinous crimes against an American citizen. The Justice Department will work for as long as it takes to pursue accountability and justice for Russia’s war of aggression.”
The Biden administration provided tens of billions of dollars’ worth of military aid over the course of the war and said it would continue to do so for “as long as it took.” At the same time, it chose not to give Kyiv everything that the leaders asked for over concerns Moscow could use that as a justification for escalating the conflict.
“I was very critical of the Biden administration, but mainly because they didn’t have a goal. It was to provide arms as long as it takes, without defining what it is, and never enough for Ukraine to actually defeat Russia and they would never talk about defeating Russia. So it was just open-ended, and I was very critical of that,” former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker told the Washington Examiner. “At the same time, I have no illusions about Vladimir Putin and his intentions. He is genocidal. He wants to eliminate Ukraine as a people, as a state, as a national identity.”
Trump has frequently shared his desire to get the Russia-Ukraine war to end and, in doing so, has warmed U.S.-Russia relations. It’s unclear if these maneuvers will be enough to convince Putin to end the war that he’s had the ability to end for three years.
“I think it is the overall orientation change of approach with this administration, the Trump administration, is to say if you’re going to stop the war, you have to engage with Russia because Russia is the one that has started this war and is pursuing this war,” he added.
The administration’s shift regarding Russia has taken many forms. Rubio, following the first U.S.-Russia meeting in the Middle East, said there could be “incredible opportunities” for them to partner together if the war “comes to an acceptable end,” while several other officials declined to identify Russia as the party responsible for the conflict.
Trump has suggested Zelensky was responsible for the war and has repeated the talking points about NATO that Putin uses to justify the war.
“So the Trump administration has said, ‘No, our goal is to end the war’ and then to do that. Well, how do you engage with Russia if you are piling on with prosecutions of things like war crimes, that may cause them to not want to end the war, they may want to continue it,” he added. “They may want to defeat Ukraine completely and seize any evidence that’s been collected as a war crime. So if you want to get Russia into a mode of saying, ‘OK, we’re willing to have a ceasefire and then a permanent settlement,’ not demonizing them is something that Trump has certainly put out as his approach.”
US TO WITHDRAW FROM BODY INVESTIGATING RUSSIAN RESPONSIBILITY FOR UKRAINE WAR
Van Schaack said, “There’s no question that the Trump administration is trying to work in a constructive way with Russia to reach some sort of a conclusion.”
Ultimately, the decision to pursue justice for alleged war crimes in Ukraine is up to the Ukrainians, and prosecutors are tracking approximately 130,000 instances of alleged war crimes.
“When you hear President Zelensky speak, the justice imperative is really clear in their voices, in their demands, in their expectations for how this conflict gets resolved,” she continued. “So there may be an ability to reach a short-term ceasefire or some sort of a peace arrangement, but the demand for justice does not go away, and eventually that will manifest itself again. It will be up to the Ukrainians to decide if they want to continue to pursue cases or if they want to relinquish that as part of a grand deal and some level that’s for them to decide.”
