WASHINGTON (AN) — A team of researchers at Yale University has used social media posts, satellite imagery and adoption databases to track thousands of Ukrainian children kidnapped by Russia in its war against Ukraine. Its loss of U.S. funding brings to a halt one of the most advanced modern efforts at recovering unlawfully deported children.
Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in Feb. 2022, Russian forces have abducted more than 19,000 Ukrainian children from occupied territories, according to the Ukrainian nonprofit Bring Kids Back UA, an initiative of Ukraine’s president. Despite widespread documentation and bipartisan concern over the kidnappings, U.S. President Donald Trump's administration is rapidly eliminating federally supported programs designed to locate and return these children.
"The cost of stopping this work is the kids from Ukraine who were taken by Russia, the chance they will come home before they're adults, or at all, goes down with us out of the game," said Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, who has been leading efforts to track abducted Ukrainian children. "That's what it means, and we should all be ashamed of ourselves that we couldn't stop it."
The United States funded several rescue efforts for kidnapped Ukrainian children, but by slashing these programs, the Trump administration has made the lives of thousands of children increasingly uncertain and more vulnerable to long-term psychological harm. Without U.S. support for such programs, the burden of care shifts to international organizations.
"The U.S. government has basically just gutted its child protection capacity," said Gillian Huebner, executive director of the Collaborative on Global Children's Issues at Georgetown University, which does cross-disciplinary research on global children's issues.
Among the casualties were Save Ukraine, a nonprofit rescuing abducted Ukrainian children that lost millions of dollars in funding when President Donald Trump terminated USAID, and its USAID-funded Save Ukraine hotline, which Ukrainian parents could call to report missing children.
Huebner, who previously worked for USAID, helped develop what the agency termed the children in adversity portfolio, which she described as "a whole-of-government initiative that tried to piece together all of the different forms of U.S. government assistance that went for vulnerable children in developing countries."
The Trump administration is set to disband the entire team, Huebner said. All of the technical advisors for the portfolio were let go. Two remaining staffers will be terminated on July 1. The website for the portfolio already has been taken down.
One of the biggest blows to child relocation efforts was the Trump administration’s elimination of the Ukraine Conflict Observatory, a U.S. State Department-funded program run by the Yale lab. In February, the White House said it would terminate the observatory’s funding. After pressure from Congress, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio temporarily restored the observatory and granted it funding in March, but only enough to keep operating until mid-May so the important data it had could be transferred to European partners.
Since its State Department funding ended, the observatory has been surviving on gift money from online donations and individual donors.
The observatory has applied its unique capabilities to track abducted children using open source information available online, with evidence ranging from Russian officials’ publicly posted selfies to satellite imagery. It also obtained information from Russian national adoption databases. Its staff reports drew on the collaborative expertise of imagery analysts, linguists, statisticians, and cultural and legal scholars.
"Our superpower is having all of the capabilities together under one roof to be able to attack data from multiple perspectives and combine data that's open source in a way that other teams don't have all the capabilities," Raymond said.
The lab not only helped track down abducted Ukrainian children but also documented attacks on civilian infrastructure like power centers, crop storage facilities, hospitals, and schools. Its findings have been used as evidence by the International Criminal Court to issue indictments against high ranking Russian officials for war crimes and crimes against humanity. In March 2023, The Hague-based ICC issued its first arrest warrants tied to the war in Ukraine, charging Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s commissioner for children's rights, with war crimes for taking children to Russia from occupied areas of Ukraine.
Russia's foreign ministry will "thoroughly review" the cases of 339 Ukrainian children who lost contact with parents or legal representatives, spokesperson Maria Zakharova said last week. She repeated the Kremlin's claim that Kiev "failed to provide any proof" children were abducted. The claim directly contradicts the overwhelming amount of evidence provided by Ukrainian nonprofits and the Conflict Observatory.
Some members of U.S. Congress who were interviewed by Medill News Service condemned the shuttering of the observatory program. The decision to defund it was "dumb and cruel," Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said.
"The State Department tracks these Ukrainian kids, and they were going to discontinue that," Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota said. "And then we got Secretary Rubio to extend it, but now we need to extend it again so they can continue to be tracked by our State Department."
'A gift to Putin'
Klobuchar and Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the second-highest ranking official in the Senate, introduced a resolution calling for the return of abducted Ukrainian children before the signing of any peace agreement. The resolution received bipartisan support. "The kids should not be used as a pawn in a war, and these kids should be returned immediately," Klobuchar said.
Huebner said several members of Congress voiced support for returning abducted children, but translating those statements into ethical action is complicated. "Everybody says, ‘Oh, we're concerned about the kids,’ but not everybody has the same talking points about what should be done," she said. "We should also all be demanding that people with child protection expertise and training are advising negotiators."
Georgetown's Collaborative trains diplomats how to include the return of abducted children in negotiations, something given little consideration in U.S.-led Russia-Ukraine negotiations. Huebner said the U.S. consulted child protection specialists in previous cases of abducted children, including when Nigeria's Boko Haram militants abducted school girls in 2014.
Vladyslav Havrylov, a former researcher for the Where Are Our People? initiative, an advocacy campaign by a Ukrainian non-governmental organization that tracks kidnapped Ukrainians, studied the different methods Russia has used to abduct children.
"Some of these children are orphans and have no parents and Russian troops are taking these children from orphanage into Russia," he said.
Russian forces have also tricked Ukrainian parents by telling them to send their kids to Russia for a summer camp in a safer region outside the conflict zone, Havrylov said. At the end of the summer, he said, Russian officials refused to return the children.
Some abducted children are forcibly adopted by Russian families, according to Havrylov, and many boys are sent to paramilitary organizations to learn how to fight in the Russian army. Havrylov said abducted children are subjected to "re-education" at schools where they are taught to glorify and support Russia.
The actual number of abducted children is likely much higher than 19,000 owing to Russia’s own claims, varying estimates, and other factors like identity erasure, propaganda, and difficulties with verification. Havrylov said Russian officials gave abducted Ukrainian children Russian surnames and Russian passports, making them much harder to track.
Abducted children also can suffer from toxic stress or periods of prolonged anxiety. Constant elevated levels of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline can alter a child’s brain and even their DNA, resulting in long-term health problems, according to a report from Harvard University's Center on the Developing Child. Huebner said this immense stress makes Ukrainian children more susceptible to brainwashing.
"If a young kid hears again and again and again that their parents are dead … [or that] they're safer in Russia, that their country doesn't exist anymore – I mean, imagine a 4-year-old or 6-year-old mind adjusting to that," said Huebner, who believes Russia's actions may constitute genocide. "Do you continue to fight it and therefore have nightmares, and or do you accept it because that makes your survival easier?"
When the Rome Statute, which established the ICC, entered into force in 2002, it recognized "genocide by forcibly transferring children" under the age of 18. Russia and the U.S. do not recognize the court's jurisdiction because they are not members; the Trump administration last week singled out four ICC judges in retaliation for actions against the U.S. and Israel. In February, Trump issued an order to block the ICC's chief prosecutor from pursuing a case against Israel over its war in Gaza. Ukraine joined the court at the start of this year.
The recent U.S. sanctions make it illegal for the observatory to share data or even communicate with the ICC, which significantly hinders efforts to hold Russian officials accountable. "It’s a gift to Putin," Raymond said.
Russia did ratify the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which took effect in 1990 and says all children have the right not to be separated from their parents against their will except when a competent authority believes it is in the children’s best interest. Russia has not complied with requirements it create registries and allow communication with parents.
At a Geneva meeting in Jan. 2024, the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child pressed Russian officials for an accounting of the situation. Russia’s deputy minister of labor and social protection, Alexey Vovchenk, who headed the delegation, said his nation "has not been involved in the deportation of citizens of Ukraine."
Just 1,347 of the abducted children have been returned, according to Bring Kids Back. At the current rate that Ukrainian children are being returned, Huebner said, it would take half a century to get all of them back. With so much work to do, the observatory’s staff keep working at full speed, despite their impending termination.
"When we run out of money," Raymond said, noting that it was the anniversary of D-Day when Allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy, France to liberate Western Europe from Nazi Germany, "we are symptomatic of that collective inaction – which is a betrayal … of what I thought it meant to be an American."
