Funding for a US-based program that tracks thousands of Ukrainian children abducted and taken to Russia is about to run out in the coming days and President Donald Trump’s administration appears to have made up its mind: “No further funding is expected, that’s a final decision,” an administration official told Kyiv Post on Wednesday, May 7.
Launched in 2022 with $6 million in federal funding, the Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab, or HRL, is part of a broader international effort to document potential war crimes and to ensure the preservation of critical evidence. It investigates deportations of Ukrainian children using open-source intelligence and satellite photos.
On Feb. 27, 2025, the Trump administration abruptly paused the lab’s funding, halting its work. The State Department has since granted the lab a six-week extension to finalize its evidence preservation efforts, which would allow the lab to complete ongoing analysis and prepare its dataset for transfer to Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency.
Kyiv Post this week has spoken with at least four current and former US officials, all of whom have ruled out any form of long-term future federal support for the lab, which is about to cease to exist.
“Without another donor other than the United States, Yale HRL goes out of business shortly,” Nathaniel Raymond, the executive director of Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab, told Kyiv Post on Wednesday.
“Our extension was only for approximately six weeks and will end within the next two to three weeks,” he added.
Although the lab was requested to pretty much wrap up its research during the six weeks long funding extension, analysts believe that its future documentation efforts could play a critical role in the peace negotiations.
President Trump has personally expressed his sympathy for the deported Ukrainian children and even asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky about them, promising “to help make sure they were returned home” as part of his efforts to bring an end to the war.
White the US administration might no longer be interested in supporting the lab to help delivering on that goal, there’s some glimpse of hope as the European Parliament today is poised to discuss and pass a resolution that calls for the Yale program to be funded by the EU.
“The Europeans have a unique chance to save the day, and to pick up from where we’ve left off,” one former US official told Kyiv Post ahead of the European Parliament’s debates.