DOGE Cuts Critical Project Tracking Ukraine’s Stolen Children

The real-world consequences of this “quiet” rug-pulling cannot be overstated.

Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made.

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Musk’s DOGE has killed funding for Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab’s work tracing the Ukrainian children kidnapped by Russia. Here, a protest in Kyiv this week. (Photo by Yan Dobronosov/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images)

In March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued its first arrest warrants in relation to the war in Ukraine. They were for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, his commissioner for children’s rights, for the war crime of “unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.”

Forcibly removed from Ukraine, used as leverage, “reeducated” and “Russified,” reportedly thousands of Ukrainian children have been used as “pawns in a hostile situation,” Nathaniel Raymond, the executive director of Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab, told me for a story I reported in 2023 for The Atlantic.

To maintain a lifeline between these children and their homes in Ukraine, the lab has meticulously created dossiers for thousands of children, keeping track of things like their last known location in Russia and the origin point from which they were taken in Ukraine. The lab uses biometric data, satellite imagery and other kinds of open-source information to track the children.

But now, 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.

“We have reason to believe that the data from the repository has been permanently deleted,” a group of lawmakers led by Rep. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio) warned in a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the Post reported. “If true, this would have devastating consequences.”

Even if the lab’s database has simply been moved, such a transfer of evidence could make its digital information inadmissible in court, a viability the Yale researchers have been very mindful of throughout their work.

A Yale University spokesperson told the Post that funding for the database has been “discontinued” but would not confirm whether the database remains intact. My own sources at the lab had not replied by the time of this publication.

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.”

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.

The guises under which the children are taken

Some of the Ukrainian children were sent over the border at the beginning of the war to what the Russians advertised as safe “summer camps” where kids could ride out the conflict in peace. Already living in the border areas where Russian was spoken, parents felt that their children would be fed and cared for and out of the way of bombs. What they didn’t realize was that a) that wasn’t going to be the case and b) they would not be able to get their children back after that.

Reports have since alleged severe abuse at the camps. No matter the conditions, the camps now appear to have been a pretext for luring the children away from their parents and into Russia. As Raymond told me: “They can be given caviar every day, riding horsies and having the best day ever, and it’s still a war crime.”

Dozens of these camps reportedly are scattered across Russia. The camp farthest from Ukraine is 3,900 miles from the border, in Russia’s Magadan Oblast. The facilities apparently specialize in political reeducation; some reports suggest that military training is also part of their program.

When Ukrainian parents were ready to bring their children home from camp, many were told that the children will remain in Russia, or that there is a “delay.” Some families have managed to recover their children, but only with great difficulty; others report that their children were not allowed to leave, have been transferred to different camps, or had become unreachable. Veronika Bilkova, an author of an Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe report about the forcible transfer of children, told me for my Atlantic story: “it seems that really the Russian Federation is getting ready, legally speaking, to be able to adopt these [camp] children.”

Not all of the Ukrainian children in Russia came by way of the camps. Others are evacuees, removed by Russian soldiers from areas of Ukraine that Russia’s shelling had made perilous. Still others were transferred through a process of filtration, in which they were separated from their parents at camps like Bezimenne, in Donetsk, where Russian forces detain and interrogate Ukrainian citizens in Russian-held territories. And then there are the children from Ukrainian orphanages raided by Russian troops, taken across the border to orphanages in Russia.

But, many of these supposed orphans actually have parents: In both Ukraine and Russia, families who fall on hard times commonly send their children temporarily to orphanages, experts told me, expecting to later recover them. But once the children are in Russia, according to an Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe report by Elina Steinerte on the forcible transfer of children, “the Russian Federation does not take any steps to actively promote the return of Ukrainian children. Rather, it creates various obstacles for families seeking to get their children back.”

At the moment, the younger the child is, the bleaker the prospects of a return to Ukraine. The only children to have made it home so far, according to legal and human-rights advocates I spoke with, are those old enough to have called their parents or guardians — providing they have any. Some of those who have made it home reported seeing younger children they knew in Russia — but with the carousel of stolen children still spinning, those sighted likely won’t stay in the same place for long.

How to bring the children home

Moscow ostensibly allows Ukrainian parents to come collect their children from Russia, but the trip is one that few Ukrainians are in a position to afford or attempt. According to a spokesperson at SOS Children’s Villages International, a nonprofit child-advocacy organization, parents —usually mothers or grandmothers, because men who undertake the trip risk being detained at filtration camps, where parents are separated from children — have to travel through third countries, such as Poland or Belarus, bringing with them extensive documentation proving that the child is theirs. They must secure passports and undergo interviews with the Russian security services. Fewer than 400 children had made it home, according to the Ukrainian government, when I published my 2023 story.

The Russian government always seems to be trying to stay ahead of its potential legal problems by shifting its laws on citizenship and adoption. A May 2022 presidential decree allows Russians who currently claim guardianship of Ukrainian children to secure Russian citizenship for those children upon request. The effect could be to attenuate the future claims of Ukraine or Ukrainians on children absorbed into Russia and made into Russians without their consent.

Russia’s legal tricks have played out before the eyes of some Ukrainian parents. Steinerte at OSCE told me about the case of a father who was separated from three of his children during filtration. “He later learned that the day he was detained, the children were put on a plane to Moscow,” Steinerte said. One of them managed to call their father and tell him that they were about to be put in an institution for adoption. Because their father was in detention, the Russians considered the children to be without parents — which made them “most certainly eligible, very much in inverted commas,” Steinerte said, “to be put in an institution, which can be thousands of kilometers away.”

Moscow is apparently working quickly and cleverly to make the deported Ukrainian children disappear into Russia. But lawyers, child advocates, parents, and OSINT groups around the world are laboring just as feverishly to track the children down before doing so becomes impossible, I wrote at the time.

“They have a gun to the head of these kids,” Raymond told me in 2023 of the Russians. “We’re the SWAT team outside the bank.”

Unfortunately, now headquarters has recalled the SWAT team, allowing the criminals to take whatever it wants from the vault with no interference and, it appears, no consequences.

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