U.S. to eliminate conflict response, war crimes investigation programs

WASHINGTON (AN) —  The U.S. State Department has announced a major reorganization plan that would eliminate its ability to document alleged war crimes in Ukraine and Russia.

Among the targets is a program critical to the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for Russians suspected of attacking Ukraine’s power infrastructure and to a bureau that has been involved in addressing conflicts globally and supporting war crimes investigations.

State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce described the cuts as part of "a reorganization plan to build an ‘America First’ State Department."

Congressional leaders like U.S. Rep. Gregory Meeks, Democrat of New York, however, said they strongly disapprove of the Trump administration’s dismantling of key State Department functions.

"I'm very much opposed to those cuts and I think that they should have come to Congress so that we could have had that discussion and talked about what needed to be – if anything needed to be – modified," Meeks, the highest-ranking Democrat on the Republican-led House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in an interview on Wednesday.

The reorganization comes amid a wave of cuts that include shuttering the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID. Former and current State Department officials say eliminating its Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations will greatly hinder U.S. diplomacy, weaken civilian protections, and let more war criminals avoid justice: the bureau collected evidence that international institutions use to prosecute war crimes.

"I'm watching my entire sector face an extinction event," said Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab, who has worked under the bureau’s Conflict Observatory program. "I'm watching the impact on my friends and colleagues," he said in an interview. "Most of all, I'm watching the impact on highly vulnerable communities that are literally dying more, and dying faster, because of the decrease or termination of levels of U.S. assistance."

Bruce told a press briefing the restructuring is part of a Trump administration plan to lessen inefficiency. "In its current form, the department is bloated, bureaucratic, and unable to perform its essential diplomatic mission in this new era of great power competition," she said.

Anne Witkowsky, a former State Department assistant secretary who oversaw the Conflict and Stabilization Operation bureau under the Biden administration, questioned whether the proposed reorganization would increase efficiency since the bureau already closely collaborated with other parts of the department. 

"The work that we were doing was already offered and available and being heavily utilized by the rest of the department, which is efficient," she said. 

Raymond said the Trump administration's repeated shuttering and restarting of State Department programs has led to major confusion and inefficiency internally. "I know people (who) have been fired and rehired five times since Inauguration Day," he said. "For an agenda that's about targeting supposed waste, fraud and abuse, that leads to a lot of waste."

The bureau has worked to anticipate, prevent and respond to conflicts globally, promote stability, and implement two laws: the Global Fragility Act and Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act.

Much of the bureau’s work on the Global Fragility Act, a bipartisan bill signed into law during the first Trump administration, involved preventing the escalation of conflicts like the expansion of terrorism in coastal West Africa. Asked about the implications of eliminating the bureau, Witkowsky responded with a question: "Why would we step back from our capacities to anticipate and prevent rising violence … (and) from partnering with other countries to make them more resilient to instability?"

Eric Rubin, a former U.S. ambassador to Bulgaria who worked with the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations when it began in 2011, said the decision to cut it reflects a larger trend in the Trump administration. 

"This is a very small bureau and a very small budget and a very small piece of the puzzle, but it is indicative of and part of this intentional withdrawal from engagement with the world. This is almost like a mindless pullback, just for the sake of pulling back, and the world's watching," he said. "It's going to have consequences on our security and prosperity."

The bureau led efforts to document war crimes and protect civilians abroad. Under the Conflict Observatory, Raymond and his team at Yale partnered with the Biden administration to assist with early investigations of potential genocide by the Sudanese paramility Rapid Support Forces against non-Arab African groups. That led to then-U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s declaration of genocide in Sudan this year.

'It's a nightmare to have lost this capacity'

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio proposed eliminating the entire Conflict and Stabilization Operations bureau last week. The White House already said in February it would abolish Raymond’s work within the Conflict Observatory program, but under pressure from Congress the termination of his lab’s contract was reversed. His lab was granted funding to keep operating until mid-May, but only so the important data it had could be transferred to European partners.

Raymond and his team used satellite imagery and open source information to document alleged war crimes in Ukraine and Russia. Their findings led to the International Criminal Court issuing arrest warrants in March for two high-ranking Russian military officers suspected of directing attacks on Ukraine’s power infrastructure and causing excessive harm to civilians during war time, a potential crime against humanity. He and his team also documented the use of Russian torture detention facilities in Kherson and destruction of crop storage capacity inside Ukraine.

The Conflict Observatory provided critical evidence for The Hague-based International Criminal Court’s first arrest warrants tied to the war in Ukraine. The ICC in 2023 charged 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. As the world’s first permanent war crimes tribunal, the ICC has 125 member nations, including Ukraine, but not the U.S. or Russia.

There are now 19,500 confirmed cases of Ukrainian children abducted by Russians, according to the Ukrainian president’s initiative, Bring Kids Back UA. That is the largest number of cases of missing children since World War II, says Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab.

Gillian Huebner, executive director of Georgetown University’s Collaborative on Global Children's Issues, said Raymond’s team did "groundbreaking" work under the auspices of the Conflict Observatory, which had equipped it with some of the best research tools available. "They were able to make much more progress than others on identifying where these kids are and really tracing them and documenting with evidence," Huebner said. "It's a nightmare to have lost this capacity."

Raymond said the Conflict Observatory provided key information for diplomats attempting to negotiate a cease-fire or a permanent end to Russia’s war in Ukraine, including a damage assessment and examination of how many Ukrainians are under Russian control.

"We've been helping see what damage has been done to different sectors — what damage has been done to the environment, to cultural sites," he said. "Those things are at the heart of the negotiations. Now, you have less publicly available, empirically obtained information of a high scientific standard. You need that stuff to do good negotiations."

Even a temporary disruption in the Conflict Observatory’s capabilities could cost lives, while eliminating the Bureau for Conflict and Stabilization Operations could hinder policymakers’ decision-making, because they would have less empirical information that helps them understand conflicts, according to Raymond. 

"It means conflicts that go longer, that stay bad longer, that have longer durations, worse effects on civilians, and with less information and technical support services to government officials who are trying to end them," he said. "It's counterproductive to a safer world."