The United States has reportedly made a temporary reversal to cut a US-backed project to compile evidence of possible Russian war crimes related to the alleged abduction of Ukrainian children.
The yearslong US-funded effort, which was spearheaded in part by Yale University, had helped pave the way for the International Criminal Court to issue indictments against Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin’s main children’s advocate.
Yale researchers found that Putin and other top Russian officials were directly involved in an organized campaign to move children out of Ukrainian territories under Russian control, and move them into Russian summer camps and foster homes.
It was done, researchers said, with little to no effort to identify the children’s parents or legal guardians.
Earlier this month, the executive director of the Yale center, Nathaniel Raymond, told RFE/RL that the State Department was ending funding for the effort, something he called “a catastrophic blow" to efforts to document war crimes.
The Trump administration had also barred researchers from passing any of their evidence to the court's prosecutors. The White House has aggressively pushed back at The Hague court, all but declaring it to be illegitimate.
This week, however, the State Department reversed its decision, The Washington Post reported, and provided 6-weeks of funding to allow researchers to transfer its evidence to the European Union’s law enforcement agency, EUROPOL.
The State Department did not immediately respond to request for comment. Nor could Raymond be immediately reached.
Responding to a reporter’s question in Washington on March 27, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed that the administration had stopped funding the effort, but suggested that the database of evidence was intact and would be transferred “to the appropriate authorities.”
“The data is secured. We secured the data,” Rubio said. “The program is not funded. It was part of the reductions that were made, but we secured the data and we’ve ensured that we have it and it can be transferred to any appropriate authorities.”