Moscow claims it’s transferring Ukrainians to safety from the conflict, yet refuses to return the children to their relatives, putting them into the adoption system as orphans instead and immersing them in Russian propaganda. Recently, the Trump administration made it even harder to track and retrieve Ukrainian children in Russia after it disbanded Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab task force, which helped to locate kidnapped children and expose complicit Russian and Belarusian officials.
U.S. cuts to foreign assistance and Trump administration sanctions against the International Criminal Court are also hurting the ability of groups to track thousands of abducted Ukrainian children, a senior European official told POLITICO last month.
In 2023, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Putin for war crimes of unlawful deportation of children from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.
The exchange of POWs is going better — becoming a rare Trump-brokered success. Since the start of his mediation efforts, the two sides have exchanged more than 2,000 prisoners, but thousands remain in captivity, with Russia not even letting international human rights watchdogs visit all of the places where it holds Ukrainian soldiers and civilians.
Trump mustn’t save Russia
Russia is feeling pain from the war it started. It has lost over a million troops killed and wounded so far and its economy has finally started feeling the impact of Western sanctions. Timothy Ash, an analyst who tracks Ukraine, estimated that the war has so far cost Russia about $2 trillion, close to its annual economic output.
Kyiv and its European allies want that pressure maintained, warning that lifting primary and secondary sanctions and allowing the resumption of trade would give Moscow time to regroup for another attack to complete its conquest of Ukraine. They also will try to convince Trump that the threat of more U.S. sanctions will force Putin to negotiate more seriously.