The State Department has quietly terminated a contract that was in the process of transferring evidence of alleged Russian abductions of Ukrainian children—a potential war crime—to law enforcement officials in Europe, two people familiar with the situation tell The New Republic.
The nixed award could make it harder to continue tracking down the kidnapped Ukrainian kids and complicate efforts to seek accountability for the abductions, says one of the sources, who has direct knowledge of the ongoing operation.
One of Ukraine’s central demands for any peace deal is the return of Ukrainian children who have allegedly been the victims of a Russian program of coerced adoption. Russia has claimed this program is a humanitarian one that benevolently adopts Ukrainian kids and makes them citizens. But under President Biden, the State Department strongly condemned it as the “forcible transfer and deportation of Ukraine’s children to camps promoting indoctrination in Russia.”
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