Yale Lab Tracking Stolen Ukrainian Children Will Survive Until October

The Ukraine Conflict Observatory at Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL), the leading organization that tracks thousands of Ukrainian children abducted and taken to Russia, announced on Monday that, it would be able to continue its operations until at least October 1, 2025 thanks to the numerous contributions of individual donors.

The move comes at a crucial time, as Russia has reportedly begun concealing information about Ukrainian children and using them as leverage for negotiations.

Launched in 2022 with $6 million in federal funding, the 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.

However, as Kyiv Post reported in May, the Trump administration had no intention to further extend the New Haven, Connecticut lab’s funding.

“No further funding is expected, that’s a final decision,” an administration official told Kyiv Post on May 7.

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According to the HRL‘s announcement Monday afternoon, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last month appealed to the public on social media to support the lab, a move which helped spur online donations for HRL through the Yale School of Public Health’s website.

“This additional funding will allow HRL to keep working until October,” reads the announcement.

An additional three months of funding for HRL’s program monitoring threats to civilians in Sudan has been raised in the past month as well.

“Despite the outpouring of generosity primarily driven by dozens of small contributions from online donors, HRL is still actively seeking the full amount of funds it needs to sustain its work on Ukraine’s missing children and the ongoing civil war in Sudan beyond October,” the authors said.

Speaking to Kyiv Post on Monday, Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the HRL, who has been leading efforts to track abducted Ukrainian children, highlighted the significance of their operations.

“We are the primary source of information about how many kids have been taken and where they are. Our information is currently some of the most actionable available,” he said.

In May, a group of leading US Senators spoke out in support of the Observatory’s work in a bipartisan resolution, and on June 11, several Democrat lawmakers sent a new letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio urging the administration to restore the project’s funding.

According to Congressional sources, the Trump administration has been withholding $8 million appropriated for the lab’s operations.

“We ask that you utilize your authority to keep the Conflict Observatory open until our appropriation request can become law,” lawmakers wrote in their letter to Rubio.