WP: The Trump administration closed the program to track children who were taken from Ukraine to Russia. Senators fear that the database is destroyed

Updated. The State Department denies data deletion. “Data exist. “They were controlled not by the State Department, but by people who control this initiative, but we know who controls the data and the site, and we are completely sure that the data exist and they were not deleted and did not disappear,” said the representative of the State Department Tammy Bruce.

The US Presidential Administration Donald Trump closed the initiative funded by the government, which documented the alleged military crimes of Russian troops in Ukraine and gathered a base for Ukrainian children forcedly taken to Russia, write Reuters and The Washington Post with reference to sources and documents.

Researchers and experts of the initiative headed by the Laboratory of Humanitarian Research of Yale University, in February, informed that the US State Department terminated their contract. From this moment, they lost access to information, including satellite pictures and biometric data about 35 thousand Ukrainian children.

A group of democrats senators, who turned to the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Minister of Finance Scott Besent, who turned to the US Secretary of State, believes that the data was removed irrevocably. “We have reason to believe that data from the storage were forever deleted. If this is true, it will have destructive consequences, ”the authors of the appeal write.

Now, researchers of the project will not be able to transfer to prosecutors of the International Criminal Court (MUS) data on children, who, among other things, led to the issuance of an arrest warrant of Vladimir Putin and the Russian authorized for children, Maria Lvova-Belova in March 2023.

“They took $ 26 million from the money of US taxpayers used to [receive] data on war crimes, and threw it into the wood chopper, including a dossier for all children. If you want to protect President Putin from judicial persecution, you destroy this thing. And they did it, ”said one of the researchers of the project. Even if the financing is restored, the integrity of the data storage remains in question, notes The Washington Post.

• Work on the investigation of the alleged war crimes of Russia in Ukraine began in May 2022. Its result was 13 public reports on Russia's actions during an invasion of Ukraine. This work contributed to the nomination of six accusations of the International Criminal Court against Russian officials, including Vladimir Putin. Maria Lvov-Belova is accused of illegally forcibly moving Ukrainian children, who are distributed to foster families and subjected to “re-education” of the Russian president and Ombudsman. Russia claims to evacuate children from the combat zone for their own security and denies the accusations.