March 16, 2025 (EIRNS)—The State Department funding for the U.S. investigation of Russia’s alleged “unlawful deportations” of children has been terminated. A Yale University spokesperson, where the research took place, confirmed that their Yale Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) researchers were “notified recently that government funding for their work on the war in Ukraine has been discontinued.” However, a reading of HRL’s Dec. 3, 2024 report—"the largest and most comprehensive high-confidence assessment to date of the placement of children from Ukraine with citizens of Russia or listed in Russia’s databases"—makes clear the project was not only a waste of money, but a dangerous farce.
Ukraine’s Permanent Representative to the UN Yury Vitrenko, as recently as a March 13 OSCE meeting, claimed that Russia has “illegally placed” over 19,000 Ukrainian children in its territory and was “forcibly” Russifying them. In the real world, however, the actual issue is the fact that Kiev objects to Donetsk and Lugansk voting to join Russia, and to Moscow setting up a program to care for those regions’ children who were in harm’s way and had no parents to take care of them.
Here are the highlights from what is listed as the “key findings of this report”: Over 20 months, the HRL project identified 314 children placed in Russia’s fostering program. They are all from Lugansk and Donetsk, with 80.4% from Donetsk, and they were brought out of those regions between April and October 2022, during the intense fighting. Of those, 122 were orphans taken from institutions. Further, 148 of them were listed in Russia’s child placement databases, with 42 of them already provided a guardian or adopted. The other 166 not in the databases were already housed with Russians. And a total of 67 children have been naturalized as Russian citizens. Cited as part of the Russification conspiracy is that, by April 2023, Russians who are legal guardians “have been empowered to apply for Russian citizenship ... on the minors’ behalf.”
