The Trump administration confirmed Wednesday that it has slashed funds for a research program that had been tracking children believed to have been abducted during Russia’s deadly invasion of Ukraine. The move delivers a tremendous gift to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
CNN reports a State Department spokesperson said the administration cut funding for the Ukraine Conflict Observatory, run out of Yale University, which had been documenting possible war crimes committed by Putin’s army. The group relied on a database to compile evidence related to “the abduction of the Ukrainian children … attacks on energy infrastructure, attacks on civilian infrastructure, and destruction of cultural sites.”
Per the report:
The database was specifically structured to pull together relevant elements for prosecution of war crimes, the source said. It is unclear who has access to the database, what will happen to the critical evidence it holds, and whether it will be able to be shared with the entities like the European Union law enforcement agency Europol.
Trump’s administration is taking offline a powerful tool that was being used to hold Putin accountable, while simultaneously making it more difficult to reunite as many as 30,000 Ukrainian children with their families. It’s still unclear whether the data that’s already been compiled is still recoverable, according to CNN’s report.
It’s a sinister move by an administration that has been disturbingly deferential to Russia as of late, even by Trump’s standards. My colleague Steve Benen wrote about reports (unconfirmed by NBC News or MSNBC) that the administration has suspended efforts to counter Russian sabotage attempts, cyberattacks and attempts to spread disinformation. Just last month, Trump caused an embarrassing scene in the Oval Office in a televised meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, doing damage to the relationship and the U.S.’s standing on the world stage. More recently the administration acquiesced to a Kremlin demand that Trump’s Ukraine-Russia envoy, former Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, be excluded from the peace talks in Saudi Arabia, on the grounds that Kellogg is too supportive of Ukraine.
It’s abundantly clear why some Russian media figures could hardly contain their glee when Trump started assembling his Cabinet this year. They could not have engineered a more pro-Russian president than Donald Trump.
