Sometime in February, date unknown, Elon Musk‘s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) cut the entire budget for Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab, which had been “painstakingly” building dossiers on Ukrainian children trafficked and/or abducted by Russia. From Lauren Wolfe writing in “Chills” Substack:
Thanks to the Trump administration, all of the lab’s critical, painstaking work—dossiers on as many as 35,000 kidnapped children—may be lost. The researchers at the Yale lab were informed in February, The Washington Post reports, that ‘the State Department had quietly terminated their contract—one of thousands eliminated at the behest of Trump appointee Peter Marocco and the Department of Government Efficiency, the budget slashing arm of tech billionaire Elon Musk.’ The real-world consequences of this ‘quiet’ rug-pulling cannot be overstated. Thousands of Ukrainian children’s lives—and thousands of their families’ lives—are depending on the efforts of this project. But the fear of some lawmakers is not just that the program has been shuttered. The fear is that its delicate work has been erased.
Wolfe notes that, even if the data housed at Yale is simply moved (to say nothing of damaged or destroyed), it might not be admissible in court. This is an important point given that evidence collected had been shared with International Criminal Court, which had already issued an arrest warrant for Putin and is actively probing the “disappearing” of Ukrainian kids.
Before the funding was pulled, the lab had already shared its work with the International Criminal Court as part of the ICC investigation of Putin and Lvova-Belova in 2023, reports The New Republic; it had also given its dossiers of the children to Ukrainian authorities, who are pursuing separate legal actions against the Russians. But, Greg Sargent at TNR writes, ‘the underlying evidence — the hard digital documentation of kids’ movements and locations, compiled with sophisticated technologies — still needs to be transferred to Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement arm….’ The Europol transfer has been halted by the withdrawal of funding, TNR reports, partly because this kind of detailed tracking ‘involves extremely complex and technologically sophisticated work, and the evidence itself — which is essential to proving the abductions — is highly complicated and must be moved via secure channels.’
AUTHOR FOOTNOTE
Instead of offering a footnote I’ll simply elevate a passage from Lauren’s pitch-perfect story (please read the entire thing and share it widely):
A bulldozer has been taken to an intricate clockwork of parts that make up human lives in war. Like much of the actions of DOGE and the Trump administration, the bulky, indiscriminate machine rambles on, leaving springs and gears and pendula smashed along the road in its wake.
SOURCES
- Chills Substack by Lauren Wolfe
- Washington Post
