ASPEN, Colorado — U.S. cuts to foreign assistance and Trump administration sanctions against the International Criminal Court are hurting the ability of groups to track thousands of Ukrainian children abducted by Russian forces during its war with Ukraine, a senior European official said Thursday.
In an interview on the sidelines of the Aspen Security Forum, Thordis Kolbrun Reykfjord Gylfadóttir, an Icelandic politician who serves as an envoy of the Council of Europe overseeing its efforts to secure the return of abducted Ukrainian children, said that the end of U.S. financial support to programs tracking the children is making it harder to secure their release.
The Trump administration cut funding to monitoring programs run by Yale University and other institutions in March as part of its freeze of U.S. foreign assistance spending. While the State Department later that month said it would resume short-term funding to the program, Secretary of State Marco Rubio reversed that announcement. Human rights groups warned at the time that this could seriously disrupt the work of groups tracking the whereabouts and wellbeing of the children.
Reykfjord Gylfadóttir said she’s now seeing evidence of that coming to pass, as the funding disruptions are adding uncertainty to these organizations’ efforts.
Some groups have managed to keep some tracking going. The Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health was preparing to lay off its Ukrainian staff on July 1, but last-minute private donations have granted the organization a lifeline until October. It’s unclear if private donations will continue to trickle in.
Reykfjord Gylfadóttir said Europe now needs to find ways to make up for lapsed funding, because understanding where children have been sent will be critical for repatriating them after the conflict ends.
“European countries will have to fund it,” said Reykfjord Gylfadóttir. “We cannot stop tracking them and then just re-track them in the months ahead. So that has to continue.” She did not specify if there were any imminent plans for Europeans to foot the bill for the programs, but said she’s working to find a way to marshal the funding to support these initiatives since they represent a hefty cost to Ukraine’s allies.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the Russian military has forcibly transported roughly 20,000 Ukrainian children into Russian territory. Human rights advocates have argued that Russia’s actions constitute a war crime and that Moscow is looking to indoctrinate and brainwash the children. Russia has defended the transfers as humanitarian evacuations.
U.S. sanctions against the International Criminal Court are also making the task of holding Russia to account for the abductions more difficult, Reykfjord Gylfadóttir added.
“People are afraid to work with fundamental independent courts to uphold the rules-based order and international law because they’re afraid of consequences with the U.S. administration,” she said.
Even though the United States is not a party to the Rome Statute treaty which created the International Criminal Court, Biden administration officials relayed information to the court, which has been investigating these abductions and other alleged Russian war crimes.
The Trump administration sanctioned the International Criminal Court in February in reaction to the international tribunal’s investigations into alleged Israeli war crimes in the Gaza Strip. Those sanctions also affect U.S. organizations supporting ICC investigations. U.S. government collaboration with the ICC’s Russia probes stopped with the Trump administration’s announcement.
Reykfjord Gylfadóttir argued securing the release of the children is an important part of the process to secure a lasting end to the war in Ukraine.
“That is a non-negotiable fundamental piece of a just peace — that is to bring those children back,” Reykfjord Gylfadóttir said.