Elon Musk Cuts Funding for Yale Lab Tracking Abducted Ukrainian Children

The U.S. Department of Government Effectiveness (DOGE), headed by multibillionaire Elon Musk, has cut off funding for the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, a team at Yale University that helped rescue hundreds of Ukrainian children abducted by Russia.

As reported in The New Republic, Musk's massive cuts in U.S. government funding have suspended the work of the Yale School of Public Health's Humanitarian Research Lab, which used extremely sophisticated tools, such as satellite imagery and analysis of open source technologies and biometric data, to identify and locate abducted children. They passed on their findings to the Ukrainian authorities to help bring them home.

It is noted that in December last year, the Laboratory released a report in which it identified 314 abducted Ukrainian children who were placed in a "systematic program of forced adoption and foster care."

The report, which was presented to the UN Security Council by Nathaniel Raymond, the Lab's executive director, states that such actions by the Russian Federation may constitute "crimes against humanityunder customary international law."

It was for this crime that the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin and Russian Children's Commissioner Maria Levova-Belova in 2023.

According to the publication, the suspension of the Yale School of Public Health's Humanitarian Research Laboratory will disappoint Ukraine's supporters in the United States, as Ukraine wants the abducted children to be returned as part of any peaceful resolution to the war. And U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently said that the fate of the abducted children is one of the "issues that need to be untangled" to "end this conflict."

According to the newspaper, citing two people familiar with the situation, the US State Department has already stopped the transfer of evidence of the Russian crime of deportation and indoctrination of children to law enforcement agencies in Europe, including Europol. The basic evidence - hard digital documentation on the movement and whereabouts of children, collected with the help of sophisticated technology - should be transferred through secure channels. But now, due to the termination of the contract, the data transfer will not take place, potentially making it more difficult to find and return the children and less likely that repatriation will take place at all, The New Republic notes.

Earlier, the International Criminal Court prosecutor Kareem Khan, who issued the arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin, was included in President Trump's sanctions list

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