Ukrainian children abducted by Russian forces during the three-year war have become among the first victims in President Trump’s so-called peace process.
Many of the Ukrainian children — numbering nearly 20,000 — were taken from their families by Russian troops early in the invasion and sent to live in Russia as part of what seemed an attempt at the Russification of the population by President Vladimir Putin. The abductions, experts say, are ongoing.
A Yale University-based research team has been tracking the whereabouts of the children, sharing its data with the International Criminal Court. The Hague-based court is still collecting evidence of war crimes against Putin and has issued arrest warrants for him in connection with the child abductions.
Advertisement
But now the team’s work has been effectively shut down by the Trump administration, and its invaluable database — including satellite imagery and biometric data tracking the identities of the children — is no longer publicly available, its whereabouts unknown.
Abducting children as a weapon of war is criminal. The government’s attempts to erase evidence of that crime are shameful. And yet here we are.
A bipartisan group of 17 congressmen, led by Democratic Representative Greg Landsman of Ohio and including Massachusetts Representative Jim McGovern, has appealed to Secretary of State Marco Rubio to reverse course.
In a letter to Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the group noted that the abductions are “ongoing” and that the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab “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 children, according to a December report issued by the group that is still available, ranged in age from 2 to 17 at the time they were taken. They included stories like that of the girl called by the pseudonym Lyubov, who said she only learned that she had been permanently placed in a Russian household “after her arrival in their home. She had thought that she would be returned to Ukraine after she temporarily stayed with citizens of Russia and was shocked to find out that she would be living with them until she came of age.”
Advertisement
And then there was Vika who said that she did not want to be placed with “citizens of Russia but believed that if she refused, her younger siblings would be separated from her and placed in a boarding school.”
The researchers carefully documented the routes used to transport the children, including “midpoint locations,” called “temporary accommodation centers” in Russian media, which were in fact reeducation camps.
The Yale researchers found children in Russia’s forced adoption program were “systematically naturalized as Russian citizens” and “exposed to pro-Russia re-education.”
One state-run institution “dedicated a week to ‘form in children ideas about our Motherland, its heroic past,’ where children attended lectures about Russia’s history.” Others, nearing fighting age, were declared “orphans” — whether they had parents back in Ukraine or not — and immediately placed in cadet training.
Work on the Yale database was first halted when Trump froze all foreign aid spending by executive order. Later a State Department official named Peter Marocco — best known for his first assignment, shutting down the United States Agency for International Development — ended the contract. 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.
“Surrender on this front will result in the total abandonment of at least 30,000 innocent children from Ukraine,” the congressmen wrote. “Our government is providing an essential service — one that does not require the transfer of weapons or cash to Ukraine — in pursuit of the noble goal of rescuing these children. We must, immediately, resume the work to help Ukraine bring these children home.”
Advertisement
Where the data currently resides remains something of a mystery. But the nonprofit Bedford-based MITRE Corporation, which owns the platform on which it was run, issued a statement Wednesday saying the State Department had formally terminated all work on the project Feb. 26, The New York Times reported. That would have been two days before Trump’s White House ambush of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
The company said that “to the best of its knowledge” the data still exists and is being maintained “by a former partner on this contract,” though it did not name that partner.
The issue attracted international attention after the story of the halting of the Yale program initially broke in the British publication The i Paper.
The Yale researches say they are fund-raising to keep their work going. But the Trump administration has dealt them a huge setback. The real tragedy is that information generated by the Yale program was shared in real time with the Ukrainian government and passed along to such organizations as the Ukraine-based Bring Kids Back UA, which has reported rescuing 1,243 children so far.
It is difficult not to view the State Department’s actions as anything other than an attempt to appease Putin, perhaps as a prelude to negotiations on ending the three-year war in Ukraine. But this is not ground that the Trump administration should be yielding.
Advertisement
To steal children is a crime. To ignore that crime is to be complicit in it. To not restart this program would be a lasting stain on this nation’s soul.
Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us @GlobeOpinion.
