By Daphne Psaledakis and Kanishka Singh
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. State Department said on Thursday that short-term funding was being given to an initiative documenting abducted Ukrainian children, after Republican President Donald Trump’s administration decided to pause the program on January 25.
The U.S. government-funded initiative led by Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab helped track thousands of Ukrainian children abducted by Russia.
The decision to terminate the program, called the Ukraine Conflict Observatory, came after Trump ordered a broad review to prevent what he says is wasteful spending of U.S. taxpayer dollars with causes that do not align with American interests.
Ukraine says that more than 19,500 children have been taken to Russia or Russian-occupied territory during the war in Ukraine without the consent of family or guardians, calling the abductions a war crime that meets the U.N. treaty definition of genocide.
Russia has said it has been evacuating people voluntarily and to protect vulnerable children from the war zone.
“Funding is being provided for a short period while the Conflict Observatory implementers ensure the proper transfer of the critical data on the children to the appropriate authorities,” a State Department spokesperson said on Thursday.
“It is part of the standard close-out procedures for terminated programs.”
Earlier this month, Democratic lawmakers called on the Trump administration to restore the program.
The program’s end raised concerns about the potential loss of access to a trove of information, including satellite imagery and other data, about some 30,000 children taken from Ukraine.
In March 2023, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his children’s rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova over the deportation of the children. Russia denounced the warrants as “outrageous and unacceptable.”
(Reporting by Daphne Psaledakis and Kanishka Singh in Washington; editing by Ross Colvin and Saad Sayeed)
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