Conspiracy or economy: US State Department denies destroying data on abduction of Ukrainian children by Russians
20 March 10:18
Data on the abduction of Ukrainian children collected as part of a Yale University project remains available despite the termination of US funding. This was stated by US State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce, Komersant ukrainskyi reports, citing European Pravda.
The U.S. administration has indeed stopped financial support for the initiative of the Yale University Humanities Research Laboratory, which monitored the deportation of children from the occupied territories of Ukraine.
“Funding was reduced based on an assessment we made of all funding, whether it was consistent with our vision of advancing American interests,”
– Bruce confirmed.
But she denied rumors that the information collected had been deleted.
“I can tell you that the conspiracy theories or fears that some data was deleted are not true. This is not true. The data is there, it was not under the jurisdiction of the State Department, we know who managed the data and the website. We know for sure that the data has not been deleted or lost,”
– the spokeswoman said.
At the same time, she did not specify whether the project staff from the university and members of other interested organizations, including international ones, still have access to this data.
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Accusations of the Trump Administration of Destroying Evidence of Abduction of Ukrainian Children
The Trump administration has found itself at the center of another scandal after accusations that it destroyed key evidence of the abduction of Ukrainian children by Russians. Reuters reported that the United States was shutting down a project that helped track Ukrainian children abducted by Russia. And The Independent accused the US State Department of deleting evidence that was crucial to the investigation of Russia’s war crimes.
A university source claims that the destroyed materials were to be used in efforts to rescue approximately 35,000 abducted children and return them to Ukraine, as well as to prosecute those responsible, including Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“They [the State Department] removed the evidence for the arrest warrant for Putin… Whether they did it by accident or on purpose, this is a great favor,”
– the source said.
Details of possible war crimes were stored in a highly secure database codenamed Caesar. Due to the termination of funding, the project’s researchers and lawyers were also forced to stop sharing data with the European Union, which investigates child abductions through EUROPOL, undermining international efforts to bring perpetrators to justice.
Yale University experts warn that such actions could lead to criminal liability for the Trump administration, as the destruction of evidence of war crimes is prohibited by international law and US law. A particularly acute problem is that the deletion of this data hinders not only legal proceedings but also active efforts to physically return children across the front line.
Abduction of Ukrainian children by Russia
on February 1, 2024, Prosecutor General of Ukraine Andriy Kostin reported that during the war, Russia forcibly removed 19,546 children from Ukraine under the guise of “humanitarian operations.”
“These children are not only displaced, but also deprived of their Ukrainian identity: they are granted Russian citizenship, placed in Russian families, forced to undergo re-education in Russian, and forbidden to speak Ukrainian. Teenage boys are often forced to participate in militarization programs,”
– Kostin said.
At the same time, this estimate of the scale of abductions of Ukrainian children is not the only one and certainly not the highest. In particular, the main organizer of these abductions, the so-called Commissioner for Children’s Rights in the Russian Federation, Maria Lvova-Belova, in the summer of 2023, mentioned the figure of 744 thousand Ukrainian children “taken by the Russian Federation.” Russia does not provide any data on this process and is not accountable to anyone, so it is almost impossible to verify the veracity of this statement.
Darya Gerasymchuk, the Ukrainian Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights, questions the figure given by Belova and believes that it is a standard exaggeration of Russian propaganda. The Ukrainian side estimates that there may be 200-300 thousand abducted Ukrainian children. These estimates are approximate, since we are talking about children from the occupied territories and information about them is collected in a variety of ways.
However, the Ukrainian side has absolutely accurate data on abductions, including personal data, only for 19,546 children. That is why this figure is officially announced, although everyone understands that it is quite far from reality.
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy has made the return of Ukrainian children from Russia a priority in the ceasefire and long-term peace talks between Ukraine, the United States and Russia.
