US President Donald Trump promised Wednesday to help Ukraine get back thousands of children allegedly abducted to Russia, even after his administration cut off funding to a university database documenting their whereabouts, officials said.
Trump asked Zelensky “about the children who had gone missing from Ukraine during the war, including the ones that had been abducted,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump's national security advisor, Mike Waltz, said in a joint statement.
The call between Trump and Zelensky came a day after the US president spoke on the phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged deportation of Ukrainian children.
“President Trump promised to work closely with both parties to help make sure those children were returned home,” Rubio and Waltz said in the statement.
But Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab, which has been tracking the missing children, lost crucial funding from the US government as Trump made sweeping cuts into foreign aid.
That decision meant researchers have lost access to a trove of information, including satellite imagery and other data, about some 30,000 children taken from Ukraine.
“The funding has been cut based on the assessments we have been making regarding a whole host of funding,” State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in a response to a question Wednesday. But she said no information was deleted.
Earlier, a group of bipartisan lawmakers said they have reason to believe that the HRL’s data has been permanently deleted, and that conflict observers like the HRL no longer have access to the satellite imagery they need to track the movements of abducted children.
Asked to defend the cuts, Bruce said not to “associate... the existing status quo as being the only way possible to achieve our goals.”
The Humanitarian Research Lab -- which is seeking donations to keep going -- says more than 19,000 children have been deported to Russia, with only 1,236 returned.
The group said it has identified more than 8,400 children from Ukraine relocated to 43 facilities in Russia or Russian-held territory and 13 in Belarus.
Russia denies abuse and describes its work as a humanitarian program to adopt orphans.
