Trump Admin Nixed Contract Helping Kidnapped Ukrainian Children
Category: News & Politics
Via: john-russell • 4 weeks ago • 11 commentsBy: Greg Sargent (The New Republic)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Even as President Donald Trump and government-demolition czar Elon Musk appear to actively favor Russia's interests amid discussions of how to end the Russia-Ukraine war, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has struck a studiously neutral posture. Rubio has suggested that any peaceful resolution must take into account Ukraine's "interests" and "their ability to prosper as a nation."
But now Rubio's State Department may have pulled a behind-the-scenes maneuver that appears tilted toward Russia's interests and could anger Ukraine and its backers in the United States, leading to more questions about the department's neutrality in the standoff.
The State Department has quietly terminated a contract that was in the process of transferring evidence of alleged Russian abductions of Ukrainian children—a potential war crime—to law enforcement officials in Europe, two people familiar with the situation tell The New Republic.
The nixed award could make it harder to continue tracking down the kidnapped Ukrainian kids and complicate efforts to seek accountability for the abductions, says one of the sources, who has direct knowledge of the ongoing operation.
One of Ukraine's central demands for any peace deal is the return of Ukrainian children who have allegedly been the victims of a Russian program of coerced adoption. Russia has claimed this program is a humanitarian one that benevolently adopts Ukrainian kids and makes them citizens. But under President Biden, the State Department strongly condemned it as the "forcible transfer and deportation of Ukraine's children to camps promoting indoctrination in Russia."
Indeed, as The New York Timesreported, Russia has not just transferred children from Ukrainian orphanages to Russian camps; it has also taken kids whose relatives want them back. The Times noted that the abductees number in the "thousands," and concluded: "This mass transfer of children is a potential war crime."
The contract is extremely sensitive, because it involves the tracking of some of these abducted children. With this award, which was initially granted several years ago and renewed in late 2023, the State Department has been underwriting work by the Yale School of Public Health's Humanitarian Research Lab, which has been using highly sophisticated tools, such as satellite imagery and analysis of open-source technology and biometric data,to identify and locate the abducted kids.
This Yale lab's work had already made international news. Last December, the lab released an explosive report identifying 314 abducted Ukrainian children who had been placed in a "systematic program of coerced adoption and fostering."
The report—which the lab's executive director, Nathaniel Raymond, presented before the United Nations Security Council—concluded that this may constitute "crimes against humanity under customary international law." The lab's work has been shared with the International Criminal Court in connection with its recent charges that Russian officials, including Vladimir Putin, committed war crimes against the kidnapped kids.
The Yale lab had also transferred names and dossiers on the abducted kids it had located to Ukrainian authorities. But 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 source with direct knowledge of the operation says.
This transfer to Europol has been interrupted by the Trump-Rubio State Department's cancellation of the award, according to that source and a Democratic congressional aide with knowledge of the contract. This sort of 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.
But now the transfer won't happen, potentially making it harder to ultimately track down and bring back the kids and less likely that the repatriations happen at all, the first source tells me. In a statement,* Yale confirmed the contract's cancellation but declined to comment directly on the State Department's decision.
This will frustrate Ukraine's supporters in the United States, because Ukraine wants the abducted kids to be returned as part of any peaceful resolution of the war. Indeed, America's own position is nominally similar to this: Rubio himself recently declared that the fate of the abducted children is one of the "issues to unravel" in order to "end this conflict." But nixing the contract could thwart that.
"Ukraine has been demanding the return of thousands of children who the Russians kidnapped," said former Congressman Tom Malinowski, who worked on Ukraine issues as an official in the Obama administration's State Department and then in Congress. "The Trump administration has agreed with Ukraine that it's an essential goal. It makes no sense for them to say that and then stop work on tracking the whereabouts of these kids."
On top of all that, this could frustrate efforts to reunite some of these kids with their families, the British news source The i Paper pointed out, in a piece that first reported many details about the stalled program. On another front, Reuters reports that ongoing Trump administration funding freezes are defunding other efforts by Ukraine to investigate and document Russian war crimes, ones that had previously been funded by the U.S.
Meanwhile, Trump has installed Pete Marocco at the State Department, where he is overseeing the destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development by gutting its funding and canceling thousands of its contracts. This has been loudly cheered by Russia, which hates USAID's promotion of democracy abroad. And ProPublica reports that in 2018, Marocco met abroad with Bosnian Serb separatist and Christian nationalist leaders aligned with Russia, in defiance of then U.S. policy.
Then there's the spectacle of Trump and Vice President JD Vance upbraiding Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in the Oval Office. After that blowup, Trump suspended U.S. intelligence sharing with Ukraine that has been vital to its self-defense against the Russian invasion, in what some observers read as a sign that the U.S. is now all but fully aligned with Russian interests in the conflict, though Trump reinstated it after Ukraine signaled openness to peace talks.
It's unclear who ordered the cancellation of the contract involving abducted children. It's likely that some Democrats in Congress—and possibly a few scattered Republicans, as well—will now demand clarity from the State Department about the fate of this program. It's plausible the administration could reinstate it, as happened with the intelligence-sharing effort.
But nonetheless, the saga is another data point demonstrating that Rubio will struggle to maintain a position of neutrality in the Russia-Ukraine conflict as long as he's a member of the Trump administration.
"Americans may take different positions about how to resolve this conflict, but I'm confident that every American, Republican or Democrat, understands why Ukrainian parents would fight to get their children back," Malinowski said. "Achieving that is essential to peace."
*This piece has been updated to include Yale University's response.
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Our country is in disgrace.
I would say that the current story only implicates the administration, not the whole country at large. I do catch your drift, though.
Truly disgraceful. Just no words strong enough to slam this level of evil.
Where are the 300,000 immigrant children that Biden lost?
False and misleading comment.
but, but, but, what about ...
The first Trump administration kidnapped children from their parents and failed to even document who the parents were so that reuniting them was next to impossible. Hundreds of them remain unreunited. As usual, Trump and Putin are on the same page.
So some think this is a disgrace.
Here's what it actually is. It is a rejection of the idea that taxpayers exist in order for whomever currently controls the government desires to do. The framers of the Constitution did not create a government for the purpose of taxing citizens for the purpose of helping other countries. Right now, using this seed as an example, the government is saying, "You're going to go to work today and from the pay you receive for it we will take a portion of it and give it away to help children in another country, whether you want to or not". You think, "I'm good with that." Okay. What if it wasn't children? What if the current government sends money to other countries to fight against the normalization of LGTBQ rights? How would you feel about going to work to fund that?
The framers absolutely did not intend the government to have this power. It absolutely intended its citizens to give money to the charity of their choice if they so wished.
Is that cold of me? Well, consider this. If giving our tax dollars for Ukrainian kids is the moral responsibility of our government, why then, would it stop there? Why would it not have the moral responsibility to help all of the world? There's people all over the world who desperately need help and even if all our money was taken in taxes and we lived on government provided subsistence living (slaves), we'd never reach most of them.
I care about people in other countries. Because I do, give money to charities that help them. That is my free choice to do. When the government does it, it's not. It's the government forcing you to give to charity whether you want to or not.
What is it we spend on a Defense Budget each year, 800 billion or so ?
Do you think you should have a say in say where that money goes and to whom it does protect, enrich, leverage, pressure, befriend, make enemy....?
Do you think that showing aid and compassion to peoples through no fault of their own find themselves victim of and from, an obvious Putin Russian aggression that Trump sides with and lies about often.
.
I Get your point, but how the scrapings off the table compare to the red meat you look right past, sorta negates your passion for monies going to help victims in these incidents, and possibly a very small % goes to other causes you disagree with. Do tell how we draw any lines and somehow make and keep everyone happy, cause it can't be done. Certain monies to aid people is quite a small amount in the bigger scheme of things, but the wealthiest among US, having to pay less on their fortunes is a far greater concern for this administration. Removing Federal workers who watch over abuse by corrupt officials placed in positions of oversight by a corrupt official, hardly seems like its going to save the monies it claims.
The Inspector Generals of what, i think six Organizations were fired by Trump, and they were all investigating Elon Musk. That sounds like there is nothing to see here no, ?
Trump and his fckn tariff fantasies, as he obviously feels empowered as he FGcks around and finds out, how to crash a perfectly good economy in how many days. Trump is the Tool fucking up this once great country. The sooner more admit to this, the sooner we might get back to being to debate where the scrapings from the table go, caused right now, there are more pressing issues in my humble opine.
Whatever it is, it isn't charity, but a legitimate Constitutional responsibility of government. I suppose, though, that your point is something like whatever it is we give for helping kidnapped Ukrainian kids, even assuming the money actually gets used for that, that it is nothing in comparison to the defense budget. That's true, but that doesn't make it right for the reasons I've already stated.
Sorry for the addition at the end there, but I assume that is what you intended? If so, no, I don't. However I think giving Ukraine money and armaments for free would be. It would be an abuse of the government's power to appropriate and disperse our tax dollars. The money and armaments should only be given with the expectation that they will pay it back. I'd even be satisfied with not including anything that amounted to interest.
Concerning Trump on this matter, he apparently wants 500 billion in rare earth minerals and various other things for the, so far, 175 billion in aid we've provided. That's ridiculous and falls in the category of loan-sharking. There is simply no justification for such a number. It's just extortion.
Sorry, but you mix in too many different issues for me to respond to.
But I've thought of a better analogy for my point.
Imagine that we're a kingdom. On one end of the kingdom scale, we have a good king and he sees as his duty to use his position and authority solely for the benefit of his subjects. This king collects only taxes necessary for that purpose.
On the other end of the scale, a king who thinks his subjects exist for his own maximum benefit and therefore taxes them in order to fulfil whatever he wishes.
Question is, where does our king (the entity we call the US government with a bad case of multiple personality disorder) fall on that scale today? Where did it fall 10 years after the Constitution was designed? Where does it appear to be heading? During WWI, Edith Wilson, Woodrow Wilson's wife, brought sheep onto the Whitehouse grounds to mow the lawn in order to save money. The wool from the sheep was auctioned off to help fund the Red cross. That's the sort of government thinking I want when it comes to tax dollars.
Lastly, consider this. The national debt isn't 36 trillion dollars because it costs that much to run government. It's because we keep on funding crap that is beyond what it takes to run the government.