In the USA, evidence of the Russian Federation's abduction of children from Ukraine was removed due to a decision by the Trump administration

Due to the United States' suspension of the program to track Ukrainian children abducted by Russia, evidence of war crimes worth $26 million has been removed. This is reported by Reuters, writes UNN.

Details

U.S. Democratic lawmakers will call on President Donald Trump's administration to restore a program that helps track thousands of Ukrainian children abducted by Russia.

According to lawmakers, the Republican president's administration has terminated a government-funded initiative led by the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab (Yale HRL), which tracked the mass deportation of children from Ukraine, amid cuts to a wide range of U.S. government programs and most foreign aid.

The State Department and the Yale Center "kept evidence of the kidnapping of children from Ukraine, whom they identified, to share it with Europol and the government of Ukraine to ensure their return

This decision by the Trump administration means that researchers have lost access to a huge amount of information, including satellite imagery and other data, on about 30,000 children taken from Ukraine.

"We have reason to believe that the data from the repository has been irretrievably deleted. If this is true, it will have devastating consequences," the Democratic lawmakers, led by Ohio Representative Greg Landsman, said in a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, which was obtained by Reuters on Tuesday and is due to be sent on Wednesday.

The termination of the program was first reported by The Washington Post. It became known on the same day that Trump spoke by telephone with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, during which Russia did not agree to a 30-day ceasefire.

A person familiar with the tracking program said that the termination of the State Department's contract with Yale HRL resulted in the deletion of $26 million worth of war crimes evidence.

They took 26 million dollars of American taxpayers' money that was used for war crimes data and threw it in the shredder, including files on all the children

"If you wanted to protect President Putin from prosecution, you would destroy this thing. And they did. This is the final version, acceptable to the court, with all the metadata," the source said.

Recall

In March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for the arrest of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan stated that there are sufficient grounds to believe that Vladimir Putin and the country's Commissioner for Children's Rights Maria Lvova-Belova are responsible for the forcible deportation of hundreds of Ukrainian children.