Trump Cuts Threaten to Halt Tracking of Ukraine’s Abducted Children

The United States’ leading initiative tracking Russia’s systematic abduction of Ukrainian children faces shutdown after funding was cut by the Trump administration, raising fears that thousands of children may vanish without trace, The Gaze reports, citing The Telegraph.

Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL), which has identified hundreds of deported Ukrainian minors and helped build war crimes cases against top Russian officials, will cease operations on July 1 unless emergency funding is secured.

Examining Russian adoption databases and digital footprints, the lab identified 314 Ukrainian children forcibly taken and registered under new Russian identities. “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,” said Nathaniel Raymond, Executive Director of the HRL.

The lab’s Ukraine Conflict Observatory, which had been tracking more than 35,000 abducted children, was launched in 2022 with $6 million in federal funding. Its open-source investigations—including satellite imagery and social media data—helped catalyze six ICC indictments, including arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova.

But in February, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), then led by Elon Musk, abruptly ended its support and locked the team out of its own databases. A temporary extension granted to transfer essential data to Europol and the Ukrainian government is now set to expire.

Human rights groups warn the consequences could be catastrophic. “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,” said Bill Van Esveld, associate director at Human Rights Watch.

The HRL’s research suggests the actual number of abducted children could range between 260,000 and 700,000. Ukraine has officially identified 19,546 missing children, but only 1,366 have been returned. 

Raymond described the system as “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.”

Some camps reportedly impose military indoctrination, with fears that older teens may be conscripted to fight against Ukraine. Vladyslav Havrylov, a fellow at Georgetown University, said 1.6 million Ukrainian children still under Russian occupation are all “at danger of being deported.”

Even peace negotiations have been shaped by HRL’s data. At Istanbul talks in early June, Ukraine presented Russia with a list of 339 children to be returned as a sign of goodwill—a list influenced heavily by the lab’s findings. Russia denied the abductions and promised to return just five.

Raymond fears public apathy has allowed the lab’s dismantling to go largely unnoticed. “It shows the world just did not care enough,” he said. “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.”

Read more on The Gaze: “The Enemy Is in Your Phone”: Russia Uses Social Media to Exploit Ukrainian Teens