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 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.
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.
