President Donald Trump has promised to ensure that children abducted from Ukraine during the war will be returned home, despite the U.S. government halting funding for research dedicated to locating them.
The White House said that Trump had addressed the issue of Ukraine’s missing kids, estimated to number around 20,000 according to officials in Kyiv, in his conversation with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday.
“President Trump also asked President Zelenskyy about the children who had gone missing from Ukraine during the war, including the ones that had been abducted,” a statement released by American officials said.
The U.S. leader said he would “work closely” with both the Russia and Ukraine to facilitate the return of “children who had gone missing from Ukraine during the war, including the ones that had been abducted.”
His interest in the missing children struck a different note from his own administration’s actions just hours previously. The State Department ended funding for a scheme that tracks the missing minors in a move branded a “catastrophic blow” by the director of the unit at Yale University that led the research.
Nathaniel Raymond from the college’s Humanitarian Research Lab told RFE/RL that the program would end on March 28, despite its work tracking the locations of 35,000 Ukrainian children in Russia.
“The loss of our work is another win for those who want to obscure the truth and who want to prevent accountability,” Raymond told the website.
“President Trump also asked President Zelenskyy about the children who had gone missing from Ukraine during the war, including the ones that had been abducted,” a statement released by American officials said.
The U.S. leader said he would “work closely” with both the Russia and Ukraine to facilitate the return of “children who had gone missing from Ukraine during the war, including the ones that had been abducted.”
His interest in the missing children struck a different note from his own administration’s actions just hours previously. The State Department ended funding for a scheme that tracks the missing minors in a move branded a “catastrophic blow” by the director of the unit at Yale University that led the research.
Nathaniel Raymond from the college’s Humanitarian Research Lab told RFE/RL that the program would end on March 28, despite its work tracking the locations of 35,000 Ukrainian children in Russia.
“The loss of our work is another win for those who want to obscure the truth and who want to prevent accountability,” Raymond told the website.
‘We can still work on returning the children’ - official
A senior U.S. official said, however, that Trump’s decision to raise the issue with Zelenskyy in their phone call showed that the abducted children were on the U.S.’s radar despite the Yale program being cut.
“I think that’s a pretty good, clear indication that we can still work on issues that matter and make them happen without it being in a certain structure that has existed,” State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said, quoted by U.S. political website The Hill.
The decision to halt the scheme’s financial backing was taken “based on the assessments we have been making regarding a whole host of funding,” Bruce added, referencing cuts to U.S. government funding across several sectors since Trump returned to power in January.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, the country’s commissioner for children, are wanted by the International Criminal Court over the kidnapping of children from Ukraine during the conflict.
Lvova-Belova has denied the accusations, saying Moscow took the children away from conflict areas for their protection.
But a report published last December by the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab said that Russian presidential aircraft and funds were used to transfer children from occupied Ukrainian territories, erase their Ukrainian identity, and place them with Russian families.
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