https://newrepublic.com/article/1927...nixed-contract
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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.
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Indeed, as The New York Times reported, 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.
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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.
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