Trump tells Zelensky he’ll address issue of abducted Ukrainian children

President Trump promised to address the issue of Ukraine’s missing and abducted children by Russia during a call with President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday, despite the halting of U.S. funding for an investigation into identifying them.

The issue is at the center of an international war crimes arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin and one of his top officials. 

“President Trump promised to work closely with both parties to help make sure those children were returned home,” national security adviser Mike Waltz and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a joint statement. 

Zelensky, in a statement following the call, said he raised with Trump “the return of Ukrainian children who were taken by Russian forces.”

While Rubio had earlier said the Ukrainians “need to get the children back,” as part of any peace settlement, the Trump administration halted funding for a key U.S. program investigating and identifying children who disappeared from Ukraine into Russia.  

“The funding has been cut based on the assessments we have been making regarding a whole host of funding, if it worked within our framework of America’s interest,” State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in a response to a question Wednesday.

Bruce indicated that Trump personally addressing the issue of Ukraine’s children with Zelensky overrides any funding cuts to specific programs. 

“I think that's a pretty good, clear indication that we can still work on issues that matter and make them happen without it being in a certain structure that has existed,” she said.

The investigations were carried out by the Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL). In a report presented to the United Nations Security Council in December, the HRL said it identified 314 Ukrainian children placed in a “systematic, Kremlin-directed program of coerced adoption and fostering.”

The New Republic reported that the Trump administration also blocked sharing the HRL’s sensitive data with European law enforcement as part of investigations into Russia’s alleged systematic kidnappings.  

A group of bipartisan lawmakers wrote to Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Wednesday raising alarm over the Trump administration’s “reduction in American leadership in countering these crimes.”

“The foreign aid freeze has jeopardized, and may ultimately eliminate, our informational support of Ukraine on this front,” the lawmakers wrote. 

“In conjunction with U.S. State Department, Yale HRL had been preserving evidence of abducted children from Ukraine it had identified, to be shared with Europol and the government of Ukraine to secure their return. Yale HRL’s funding has been terminated and the status of the secure evidence repository is unknown. This vital resource cannot be lost.”

The lawmakers said they have reason to believe that the HRL’s data has been permanently deleted, and that conflict observers like the HRL no longer have access to the satellite imagery they need to track the movements of abducted children. 

“Yale HRL used this imagery to prove to the United Nations Security Council how Russia is abducting and concealing these children within domestic systems,” the lawmakers wrote. 

Bruce said no information was deleted. 

“Conspiracy theory or fear about data being deleted is untrue. That is false,” she said. 

“The data exists, it was not in the State Department’s control. It was the people running that framework, we know who was running the data and the website we know fully that the data exists and [it's] not been deleted and not missing.” 

Ukrainian officials say they believe Russia has kidnapped at least 20,000 Ukrainian children, but the actual figure is likely to be higher. Kyiv criticized Moscow for failing to deliver statistics on children it transferred from occupied territory in Ukraine into Russia. 

Some 500 kidnapped Ukrainian children have been returned to Ukraine through the help of nongovernmental organizations through February 2024.

Some of these returned children testified in front of the U.S. Helsinki Commission. They described being taken from their families in Ukraine, placed in so-called summer camps in Russia and then adopted by Russian families.  

Updated: 3:07 p.m.