Quote Originally Posted by ClydeR View Post
First, Russia needs to return the 20,000 Ukrainian children kidnapped and taken to Russia. I bet Trump hasn't even raised that issue with Russia, since it doesn't involve money going into his pocket.
I knew Trump would abandon the kidnapped children, who have no economic benefit to offer.

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.”

Indeed, as The New York Times reported, Russia has not just transferred children from Ukrainian orphanages to Russian camps; it has also taken kids whose relatives want them back. The Times noted that the abductees number in the “thousands,” and concluded: “This mass transfer of children is a potential war crime.”

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This transfer to Europol has been interrupted by the Trump-Rubio State Department’s cancellation of the award, according to that source and a Democratic congressional aide with knowledge of the contract. This sort of tracking involves extremely complex and technologically sophisticated work, and the evidence itself—which is essential to proving the abductions—is highly complicated and must be moved via secure channels.

But now the transfer won’t happen, potentially making it harder to ultimately track down and bring back the kids and less likely that the repatriations happen at all, the first source tells me. In a statement,* Yale confirmed the contract’s cancellation but declined to comment directly on the State Department’s decision.