Democratic and Republican lawmakers sent a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio asking whether a database of thousands of children had been deleted.
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A regional orphanage in Kherson, southern Ukraine, in 2022. Russian authorities are accused of abducting hundreds of Ukrainian children to Russia or Russian-controlled territory during their occupation of the region.
The State Department has stopped funding to track tens of thousands of Ukrainian children kidnapped by Russia, and U.S. officials or contractors may have deleted a database containing information about them, U.S. lawmakers said in a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday.
Work on abducted children by the Yale School of Public Health’s Humanities Research Lab was frozen when President Trump signed an order in late January halting nearly all foreign aid spending. Mr. Rubio and his underling, Pete Marrocco, have since terminated the vast majority of foreign aid contracts, including the Yale lab’s.
A bipartisan congressional letter signed by 17 lawmakers and authored by Representative Greg Landsman, an Ohio Democrat, said “the foreign aid freeze has jeopardized and could ultimately undermine our outreach to Ukraine on this front.”
The State Department and the Yale Center “preserved evidence of abductions of children from Ukraine who had been identified in order to provide it to Europol and the Ukrainian government to ensure their return,” the letter said, according to a copy obtained by The New York Times. Europol is the European Union’s main law enforcement agency. The letter was also addressed to Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary.
“We have reason to believe that the evidence vault data has been permanently deleted,” it reads. “If true, this would have devastating consequences. Can you tell us the status of the evidence vault data?”
A person familiar with the Yale center's work said the information in the letter was accurate.
The Yale lab was one of several recipients of $26 million in congressional funding over three years through the State Department to track war crimes committed by Russian forces in Ukraine. That work began in 2022 under a program called Conflict Observatory, which also documented atrocities in Sudan. The Conflict Observatory pages were removed from the State Department website under Mr. Rubio, though its findings were preserved elsewhere online.
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