The Trump administration has cut funding for investigations into Russian crimes in Ukraine — Reuters
The Trump administration has cut funding to organizations working to document Russian war crimes in Ukraine, including torture, the killing of civilians, and the abduction of children. As a result, Yale University, which is involved in the search for deported Ukrainian children, did not receive approximately $8 million in allocated funds.
This is reported in a Reuters investigation.
Reuters reviewed government documents and conducted more than 40 interviews with investigators, lawyers, human rights activists, and officials. According to the publication’s estimates, the total amount of U.S. funding for programs documenting war crimes in Ukraine since 2022 has exceeded $283 million. Programs accounting for at least 40% of these funds have either been canceled or were not renewed upon expiration.
The cuts came after Trump froze foreign aid for 90 days in January 2025 for review. Some programs subsequently received no funding at all.
Among those affected is the Ukrainian human rights organization Truth Hounds, which has been documenting war crimes since 2014. It was forced to cut staff, suspend an archival project, and cancel training sessions for judges and prosecutors. U.S. funds had covered a third of its budget since 2023.
“Some important areas of work will not be launched at all,” Truth Hounds co-director Dmytro Koval told Reuters.
The Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, which tracks the whereabouts of thousands of deported Ukrainian children within Russia and its occupied territories, will run out of funding in August. The U.S. State Department has blocked approximately $8 million that was supposed to go to the lab.
“Without this, we’re looking at a multi-year setback,” warned Mariam Lambert, co-founder of the Dutch Emile Foundation, which helps return children home.
Yale researchers use satellite imagery and open-source data to track children in over 200 facilities—part, they claim, of a vast network of forced re-education. Regarding the scale: the Ukrainian side reports more than 20,500 deported or forcibly displaced children; slightly more than 2,000 have been returned. Yale researchers estimate the total number of children taken away at 35,000.
Truth Hounds investigator Roksolana Makar traveled to Izyum, where she met a 55-year-old woman named Alla. Alla recounted that in 2022, during the occupation of the city, Russian soldiers held her at a battery factory for ten days. There, she said, they beat her, ran electric shocks through her body, suffocated her with a gas mask, and raped her.
“I begged them to kill me because I couldn’t take it anymore,” she told the investigator.
According to Makar, the funding cuts threaten the investigation’s work even before the collected testimonies are properly documented and preserved. “There is less hope for justice,” she concluded.
The U.S. Retreat and Europe’s
Response In parallel with the funding cuts, Washington dismissed the coordinator of the investigation into Russian war crimes, disbanded the interagency working group, eliminated the State Department’s office for responding to mass atrocities, and withdrew from the multinational group that was preparing cases against Russian leadership for aggression. The Trump administration also disbanded a specialized group of prosecutors established by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2022.
The State Department assures that the U.S. continues to provide “substantial assistance” to Ukraine on issues of justice and accountability for crimes.
At the same time, the European Union and the United Kingdom have stated that they are maintaining their commitments. The EU announced €50 million for the protection of children and €10 million for a special tribunal against Russia’s top leadership for the crime of aggression. The UK has allocated over £6 million to support victims and search for deported children.
Trump is considering two candidates as possible successors — NYT
As a reminder, U.S. President Donald Trump’s approval rating among Americans has dropped to nearly its lowest point since his return to the White House.
At the same time, Trump once again repeated the threats he has been making in recent weeks: “If they agree, it’s over; if not, we’ll bomb them.”
Official Tehran refused to participate in the second round of peace talks with the United States, which were to take place in Islamabad.
