The Ukraine Conflict Observatory, a Yale University-led initiative that has documented Russian war crimes including the deportation of Ukrainian children, is preparing to close within weeks after the Trump administration terminated its funding.

Nathaniel Raymond, Executive Director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, told CNN the program is “running on fumes” with approximately two weeks of funding remaining from individual donations.

“As of July 1, we lay off all of our staff across Ukraine and other teams and our work tracking the kids officially ends. We are waiting for our Dunkirk moment, for someone to come rescue us so that we can go attempt to help rescue the kids,” Raymond said.

The observatory was launched in May 2022 with State Department backing to “capture, analyze, and make widely available evidence of Russia-perpetrated war crimes and other atrocities in Ukraine,” according to sources familiar with the program.

Over three years, it has compiled a database containing information on more than 30,000 Ukrainian children allegedly abducted by Russia across 100 locations.

The initiative’s work contributed to six International Criminal Court indictments against Russia, including two cases related to child abductions, Raymond stated. The program’s closure will create what sources describe as a significant intelligence gap, as no other organization has tracked Ukrainian child abductions with comparable scope and detail.

Funding was initially cut as part of Department of Government Efficiency reductions, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio temporarily reinstated support to facilitate data transfer to Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency. The transfer of evidence documenting alleged war crimes – including attacks on energy infrastructure, filtration sites, and civilian targets – is expected to occur within days.

Meanwhile, congressional representatives have mounted efforts to restore permanent funding through bipartisan letters to Rubio. A group led by Democratic Representative Lloyd Doggett wrote that “research must continue unabated to maintain the rigorous process of identifying every Ukrainian child abducted by Russia.” The lawmakers stated the observatory “has verified that at least 19,500 children have been forcibly deported from occupied areas of Ukraine, funneled into reeducation camps or adopted by Russian families, and their identities erased.”

The congressional letter emphasized that “the Conflict Observatory’s work cannot be replaced by Europol or other organizations, none of whom have access to specific resources that have made the Observatory’s work so successful.”

A separate congressional correspondence from Democratic Representative Greg Landsman and colleagues questioned whether $8 million in previously allocated funding could still be disbursed to the program. The letter warned that “withholding these funds could appear to be a betrayal of the thousands of innocent children from Ukraine.”

The lawmakers noted that the actual number of affected children likely exceeds documented cases, citing a Russian official’s July 2023 statement that Russia had relocated 700,000 children from Ukrainian conflict zones. Additional children remain unidentified due to the Kremlin changing their names, place of birth, and date of birth.

During Istanbul talks on 2 June, Ukraine’s Presidential Office head Andrii Yermak said the Ukrainian team provided Russia with a list of deported children requiring repatriation. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy indicated the list contained nearly 400 names. Russian representatives disputed claims of having taken 20,000 children, maintaining the number involved only “hundreds.”