For days now, the State Department has remained mum about the news that it terminated a contract with a humanitarian group that was tracking the fate of Ukrainian children abducted by Russia after the Russian invasion. The revelation—which we first reported last week—suggests that the United States may now be in the position of helping Russia bury a potential war crime, complicating negotiations to end the Russia-Ukraine war. Yet the State Department won’t explain why this contract was terminated, or even how it happened at all.
But now this developing scandal has gotten worse. The underlying data collected in the course of tracking these children may have been deleted in connection with this contract’s termination, over a dozen members of Congress have now charged in a letter they just sent to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
What’s more, the group tracking them may have now lost access to the satellite imagery it has been using to track the children, the letter claims, which means untold numbers of them could disappear from the view of these monitors.
“If true, this could have devastating consequences,” the representatives write in their letter, which we obtained. The letter is spearheaded by Democratic Representative Greg Landsman of Ohio, and of its other signatories, two are Republicans: Representatives Don Bacon of Nebraska and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania.
This dark turn in the saga will put Rubio in an increasingly awkward position, and raise more questions about how the State Department handled this termination and whether it cavalierly put extraordinarily consequential data at risk. It will also prompt more scrutiny of the role of Pete Marocco, who’s been installed at the State Department to carry out Elon Musk’s demolition of the government from within, and is known to sympathize with pro-Russia strongmen and dictators abroad.
Under the contract—which was first approved by the State Department under Joe Biden—the Yale University School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab has been using sophisticated technologies to identify and locate Ukrainian children taken by Russia. This has been widely labeled a war crime, including by the International Criminal Court, which indicted Russian leaders for it in 2023.
This Yale lab’s efforts produced dramatic results: It has located thousands of kids via satellite imagery, biometric data, and other means. In December, it announced the identities of 314 of these kids, and presented evidence before the United Nations Security Council that the abductions amounted to crimes against humanity under international law.
The contract had been frozen since January as part of the Trump-Musk funding freeze. But now, its termination by the State Department means something worse: The underlying evidence and data tracking the kids will not be transferred to Europol, the law enforcement arm of the European Union. Some of the evidence apparently also won’t be transferred to Ukraine.
The Yale lab had been preserving this digital evidence and prepping for these transfers. Because the tradecraft involved in locating these children is so complex, that evidence is critical to proving their abductions and continuing to track them, and it must be transferred via extremely secure channels—a process that has been interrupted by the contract’s termination.
But now the question is: What happened to all this evidence and data? In their letter, the lawmakers make a startling assertion: The repository containing all of it in a secure location is missing.
“The status of the secure evidence repository is unknown,” they write. “We have reason to believe that the data from the repository has been permanently deleted.” A person directly familiar with the Yale operation told me the letter is accurate.
The representatives also call on Rubio to update them “as to the status of the data from the evidence repository.” And they say failure to find the data could result in the “total abandonment” of thousands of “innocent children from Ukraine.”
Let’s not mince words about this. The State Department’s termination of this contract not only interrupted the transfer of evidence of potential Russian war crimes to European allies; it also may have erased that evidence altogether.
“This is a huge concern,” Democratic Representative Adam Smith, one of the letter’s signatories, told me. “Have they deleted this information? Where did it go?” Smith added: “The State Department is controlling this information. They have to be the ones to tell us: Where is it?”
This could get dicey for Rubio. While President Trump and Musk have not disguised their alignment with Russia in the war, Rubio, once a fierce critic of Vladimir Putin as a senator, has struck a neutral posture. He carefully says Ukrainian interests must be honored in any peace deal. With Ukraine calling for the return of kidnapped children to be part of an agreement, Rubio himself has explicitly said addressing their abductions must play a role in any settlement.
Yet now the State Department won’t say what happened to this database and the evidence in it, things that are pivotal to ensuring that the abductions are indeed addressed. Why?
Then there’s another question: Who exactly ordered the termination, and did that person have a role in the disappearance of this information?
Marocco, for instance, has become a kind of terminator in chief inside the government, almost single-handedly carrying out Musk’s demand for total demolition of the United States Agency for International Development, something cheered by Russia and other dictators abroad.
Now The Washington Post, which first reported on the letter, offers this extraordinary revelation:
During a listening session with State Department employees last month, Marocco, the official in charge of foreign assistance, cited the $13 million spent on the Yale-led initiative as an example of “waste,” according to notes taken by a meeting attendee and obtained by The Post.
That suggests Marocco himself may have targeted for elimination this particular effort tracking the Ukrainian children abducted by Russia.
As Smith points out, the Trump administration is sending mixed signals. Does it genuinely want a resolution to the Russia-Ukraine war that to some degree sincerely takes Ukraine’s interests into account (as Rubio suggests)? Or is it overtly seeking better relations with Putin, and is it willing to sell out Ukraine to achieve that (as Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and other MAGA Republicans have indicated)?
How the State Department resolves the fate of the evidence of abductions could help settle that question, Smith says: “This would be an important indicator of which of those two things is true.”
This story is likely to get bigger—and a whole lot darker too.
