US President Donald Trump has U-turned his decision to cut funding for a team to track down Ukrainian children stolen by Russia.
Nearly 20,000 children have been abducted by Vladimir Putin’s forces since he launched his invasion in 2022, according to Ukraine.
The Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab has spent years rescuing hundreds of these kidnapped children.
But the group’s funding was gutted by Elon Musk’s cost-cutting agency, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, it was revealed this month.
Amid international outcry, the Trump administration has reversed this decision, officials told The Washington Post today.
Funding will be restored for at least six weeks.
Yale’s initiative, called the Conflict Observatory, sees experts use open-source information and commercial satellite imagery to find the children.
Exactly how many children have been taken is unclear, but campaigners say Russia may have carried out the largest state-sponsored kidnapping of children in modern history.
Yale researchers have pinpointed 6,000 children taken to Russia and more than 2,400 to Belarus.
Many have not only been torn away from their loved ones, but have been tortured, denied food and forced into militaristic education.
At least 314 youngsters have become trapped in Russia’s adoption and foster system and made Russian citizens, a move that Ukraine says is erasing their Ukrainian identities and indoctrinating them with Moscow’s agenda.
A Russian parliamentarian claimed last July ‘700,000 children had found refuge’ in Russia.
This information is shared with Europol and the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is trying to bring war crime charges against Russian officials.
In 2023, the court issued arrest warrants for Putin of Russia and the Kremlin’s children’s rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, for deporting children from Ukraine.
But the Yale researchers have struggled to work since January after Trump signed an executive order freezing all foreign aid.
The news was criticised on both sides of the political aisle, with Democrats and Republicans in Congress and Christian groups urging Trump to spare the observatory.
Greg Landsman, a Democratic Representative in Ohio, said in a letter to the White House: ‘The termination of this contract never should have happened, but I’m grateful to see State change its mind.
‘This shows that bipartisan, bicameral pressure got the administration to change course, but this still isn’t good enough.’
With funding now resorted, for now at least, Yale researchers will continue sending their data to EU police officials, the State Department said.
What will happen once the provisional funding ends is unknown.
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