“Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.” — John F. Kennedy
Two years ago, the International Criminal Court (ICC) indicted Russian President Vladimir Putin for war crimes and issued a warrant for his arrest.
The court cited “Mr. Putin’s responsibility for the abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children.” It also issued a warrant for Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, the public face of the Kremlin-sponsored program that transfers children out of Ukraine and into Russian homes.
At the time, the Court said, “There are reasonable grounds to believe that each suspect bears responsibility for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population and that of unlawful transfer of population from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.”
Experts estimate the stolen children who have been taken from their parents, sent to Russia, and given to Russian families now number nearly 20 thousand¹. Mykola Kuleba, founder of the charity Save Ukraine, said, “Russia is stealing our future.”
When the ICC issued the warrants, Russia’s Foreign Ministry quickly dismissed them, noting Russia is not a party to the court — neither is the U.S.
When the children began disappearing, the Ukrainian government created the non-profit Bring Kids Back to find abducted children, rescue them, and bring them home to unite with their parents.
Thus far, these are the results of that effort.
Ten days ago, the group announced it had found four more kidnapped children in Russian-occupied territories and had rescued and reunited them with their parents.
A research team at the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab has been tracking the children’s whereabouts and sharing its data with Ukraine’s government and the Hague-based ICC, which is still collecting evidence of war crimes against Putin.
But now the stolen children seem to have become victims in Donald Trump’s so-called peace process. Why? Because the Trump administration has effectively shut down the Yale research team’s work and its invaluable database — including satellite imagery and biometric data tracking the identities of the children. The database is no longer publicly available; its whereabouts unknown².
A bipartisan group of 17 congressmen, led by Democratic Representative Greg Landsman of Ohio, has appealed to Secretary of State Marco Rubio to immediately remedy this.
In a letter to Rubio and Secretary of Treasury Bessent, the group reminded the two leaders the abductions are continuing and that the Yale Team “had been preserving evidence of abducted children from Ukraine it had identified, to be shared with Europol [the European Union’s law enforcement agency] and the government of Ukraine to secure their return. Yale HRL’s funding has been terminated, and the status of the secure evidence repository is unknown. This vital resource cannot be lost.”
The Yale team had also been sharing its information with Bring Kids Back, and that information had been instrumental in finding and rescuing the more than 1,200 children who have, thus far, been reunited with their parents. However, the team was working through a State Department grant that, with the DOGE team’s help, suddenly went *poof* in the night.
The Yale lab was among several recipients sharing in a $26 million congressionally approved three-year expenditure aimed at tracking Russian war crimes in Ukraine.
Nobody in the Trump Administration seems even a little bit interested in continuing to track Russian war crimes in Ukraine.
The Yale team had carefully documented the routes used to transport the children, including “midpoint locations,” called “temporary accommodation centers” in Russian media, which were, in fact, re-education camps.
The Yale lab’s work had already made international news. Last December, the lab released an explosive report identifying 314 abducted Ukrainian children who had been placed in a “systematic program of coerced adoption and fostering.”
Rather than ask anyone in the Yale team what they were doing or why it mattered, Trump buddy and former Pentagon functionary Peter Marocco, who suddenly became a State Department official when no one was looking, summarily ended the contract funding the Lab’s work. Marocco’s first assignment upon hitting Trump 2.0 was shutting down USAID, the United States Agency for International Development. He’s been a busy little wrecking ball. We’ll give him that.
The Yale team’s work began in 2022 under a program called the Conflict Observatory. Pages on the Conflict Observatory have now been removed from the State Department website at the direction of Secretary Rubio, although it is believed data from them have been saved elsewhere online. I was not able to find them.
You may want to ask yourself, as I did, why no one in the Trump orbit seems interested in the fate of nearly 20,000 children abducted by Putin’s troops to be repatriated to Russia. Even more than that, you might question why, in addition to being uninterested, Trump’s minions are also doing their best to prevent anyone else from discovering where those children are now.
In the first 64 days of Donald Trump’s second administration, he, Elon Musk, and their legion of hatchet men and women have been gleefully cruel and sadistic. In my mind, shutting down USAID, which Atul Gawande, former Director of the agency’s Global Health Department, estimates will cause millions of deaths, was the most reprehensible action of a number of reprehensible actions.
However, the Ukrainian “living messages” John Kennedy described have been ripped from their parents’ arms and cast somewhere into the Russian darkness. And America just wantonly deep-sixed the means to find them. In the pantheon of brutal and heartless conduct, this is a monumental achievement.
What do you think?
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¹ However, in a stunning admission, in July 2023, a Russian official said Russia had brought 700,000 children from conflict zones in Ukraine to Russia.
² Details of the State Department’s termination of its contracts for researching potential Russian war crimes in Ukraine were reported earlier by The i Paper, a British news site, and The New Republic.
