A group of Democratic U.S. lawmakers penned a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. (Reuters)
News of the letter came on Tuesday, the same day U.S. President Donald Trump spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who stopped short of agreeing to a 30-day truce in Moscow's war against Ukraine.
A person familiar with the tracking program said the canceled State Department contract led to the deletion of $26 million in war crimes evidence.
"They took $26 million of U.S. taxpayers money used for war crimes data and threw it into the woodchipper, including the dossiers on all the children," the person told Reuters.
"If you wanted to protect President Putin from prosecution, you nuke that thing. And they did it. It’s the final court-admissible version with all the metadata," the person added.
News of the letter came on Tuesday, the same day U.S. President Donald Trump spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Getty Images / Fox News Digital)
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Ukraine has described the abductions of tens of thousands of its children taken to Russia or Russian-occupied territory without parental consent as a war crime that meets the U.N. treaty definition of genocide.
Russia has claimed it has been evacuating people voluntarily to protect vulnerable children from being caught in the crossfire.
In March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued warrants for the arrest of Lvova-Belova and Putin in connection with the abduction of Ukrainian children, a move Russia denounced as "outrageous and unacceptable."
Eurojust, Europe's agency for criminal cooperation, said on Tuesday it learned the U.S. government was ending its support for the International Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine, which was collecting evidence to prosecute Putin and others. The U.S. special prosecutor at Eurojust, Jessica Kim, would leave as part of the move.
Reuters contributed to this report.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-administration-ends-program-track-kidnapped-ukrainian-children-russia-lawmakers-say