The State Department has temporarily restarted funding for an entity that is dedicated to tracking Ukrainian children abducted by Russian forces, following backlash from Capitol Hill.
The Conflict Observatory, which tracks the mass deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia, will be provided funding for "a short period" while the administration works to transfer its data to other international agencies, a department spokesperson confirmed to the Washington Examiner late Thursday.
"Funding is being provided for a short period while the Conflict Observatory implementers ensure the proper transfer of the critical data on the children to the appropriate authorities," a State Department spokesperson told the Washington Examiner.
Its funding had been cut because it was among the programs deemed not aligned with the administration's mission, State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce confirmed last week.
The Conflict Observatory, which works within Yale's Humanitarian Research Lab, has tracked more than 8,400 children from Ukraine who have been relocated to at least 57 facilities in Belarus, Russia, or Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories.
The administration will fund the lab for six additional weeks to ensure it can transfer the data repository to Europol, the European Union's law enforcement agency.
"The Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) at the Yale School of Public Health has resumed its work on behalf of the State Department, investigating the alleged mass deportation of Ukrainian children using open-source data and remote sensing analysis," a Yale University spokesperson told the Washington Examiner. "HRL has received a six-week funding extension from the State Department and is completing the evidence preservation activities that were terminated on February 27. HRL’s repository of data will be transferred to Europol in the coming weeks."
A bipartisan group of senators reached out to Secretary of State Marco Rubio in light of the announcement, expressing concern and seeking an explanation.
This was one of thousands of contracts canceled by the Department of Government Efficiency.
"Well, I know that it was cut, and it was cut as the things that have been cut were not assessed to be within the framework of what mattered to this administration on the issue of making America safe and secure or more prosperous, but also it's an issue about waste and abuse," Bruce said last week. "So when we think about a particular effort, it's important to realize that it's the goal that we need to address, versus a particular structure that might be happening."
Trump raised the issue of tracking down the children and returning them to Ukraine in his conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week, according to a readout from the administration.
The International Criminal Court announced an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, the commissioner for children’s rights in the Office of the President of the Russian Federation, in March 2023, accusing them of being responsible for these child deportations.
Yale's HRL released a report in December 2024 that found Putin "intentionally and directly authorized" the abduction of children from Ukraine's Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts where they were then placed in a "systematic program of coerced adoption and fostering."
Ukrainian leaders have said this aspect of Russia's war is part of its greater effort to erase Ukrainian identity and indoctrinate these children with Russian ideologies.
US TO WITHDRAW FROM BODY INVESTIGATING RUSSIAN RESPONSIBILITY FOR UKRAINE WAR
The Trump administration has made its stance clear since coming into office: Officials want the war to come to an end. It has restarted diplomatic overtures toward Moscow in this vein, though Moscow has largely shown reluctance to end the conflict it could have ended any time in the last three years.
Last week, the U.S. withdrew its participation from the International Center for the Prosecution of the Crimes of Aggression against Ukraine, an international body designed to preserve evidence in the investigation of the Russian leaders responsible for the invasion of Ukraine.