CNN
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The preeminent body tracking alleged Russian war crimes in the war with Ukraine, including the abduction of Ukrainian children, has transferred its data to Ukraine’s government and the US State Department as it prepares to shut down in the coming weeks after the Trump administration terminated its funding.
“Right now, we are running on fumes, we have about two weeks of money left, mostly through individual donations from our website. As of July 1, we lay off all of our staff across Ukraine and other teams and our work tracking the kids officially ends. We are waiting for our Dunkirk moment, for someone to come rescue us so that we can go attempt to help rescue the kids,” Nathaniel Raymond, the Executive Director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, told CNN.
The Ukraine Conflict Observatory, an effort led by Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab, has collected more than three years of data following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with the backing of State Department funding. The effort was launched in May 2022 “to capture, analyze, and make widely available evidence of Russia-perpetrated war crimes and other atrocities in Ukraine.”
The database currently includes the information and identities of over 30,000 Ukrainian children who were allegedly abducted by Russia across 100 locations, explained a source familiar with the data. The initiative’s closure will leave a major blind spot because no other body has so closely tracked the abduction of Ukrainian children.
The lab’s work has supported six International Criminal Court indictments against Russia, including two related to the abduction of children, Raymond said.
Earlier this year, the effort’s funding was cut off as part of Department of Government Efficiency cuts, which resulted in researchers at Yale losing access to the database. But the funding was reinstated for a short time by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to ensure that the data was transferred to the European Union’s law enforcement agency, Europol, so that it could be used as evidence in future war crimes cases.
The transfer to Europol is expected to happen within hours or days now that the data and evidence of the alleged war crimes – including attacks on energy infrastructure, filtration sites, and attacks on civilian infrastructure – has been finalized for the time being by researchers at Yale and shared with the State Department, the source said.
CNN has asked the State Department for comment.
The scramble to keep the program alive has unleashed new efforts by a wide variety of individuals who are looking for private funding that could keep the effort alive.
Members of Congress defended the observatory’s work and its necessity earlier this year and sent another letter to Rubio on Wednesday urging the administration to restore funding.
“Research must continue unabated to maintain the rigorous process of identifying every Ukrainian child abducted by Russia. The Conflict Observatory has verified that at least 19,500 children have been forcibly deported from occupied areas of Ukraine, funneled into reeducation camps or adopted by Russian families, and their identities erased,” wrote a bipartisan group of House members, including Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett.
“The Conflict Observatory’s work cannot be replaced by Europol or other organizations, none of whom have access to specific resources that have made the Observatory’s work so successful,” the letter said.
Congressional offices have learned that the State Department notified Congress late last year of their intent to disperse about $8 million in funding for the program, congressional aides said. They are trying to find out if that money has been reprogrammed or could still be allocated to the effort, they added.
That funding question was raised to Rubio in a second letter from members of Congress that they planned to send on Wednesday evening.
“Although we do not believe this to be your intent, we fear that withholding these funds could appear to be a betrayal of the thousands of innocent children from Ukraine,” wrote Democratic Congressman Greg Landsman and a group of colleagues.
The letter goes on to ask if there is “a plan to disburse this funding to the Ukraine Conflict Observatory in accordance with the congressional notification.”
Meanwhile, Ukraine and Russia began prisoner swaps this week, with Ukrainian soldiers who have spent nearly the entire duration of the war in captivity among those returning home. But efforts to secure an end to the war appear out of reach for the time being. And without future data from the initiative – which is sourced from satellite imagery and biometric data – efforts to secure the release of Ukrainian children captured in the future could be severely hampered.
“The Conflict Observatory has verified that at least 19,500 children have been forcibly deported from occupied areas of Ukraine, funneled into reeducation camps or adopted by Russian families, and their identities erased. The actual number of children remaining in Russia is presumably significantly higher, with a Russian official stating in July 2023 that Russia had brought 700,000 children from conflict zones in Ukraine to Russia,” the first congressional letter said.
There are also many children who have already been abducted who have yet to be identified “due to the Kremlin changing their names, place of birth, and date of birth,” the members wrote.
This story has been updated with additional details.
CNN’s Jennifer Hansler contributed to this report.
