Over 20,000 Ukrainian children have been forcibly separated and deported to Russia. A Russian official said Russia had brought 700,000 children from conflict zones in Ukraine.

Since the start of the war, devastated Ukrainian parents having been trying to locate and reunite with their children.

And the US has played an instrumental role in helping them. 

Until now.

As NYT reports, the State Department has ended funding for the tracking of thousands of Ukrainian children abducted by Russia, and American officials or contractors might have deleted a database with information on them.

The database, created by the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab, to document children forcibly taken from Ukraine and placed in Russian-controlled territories or adopted into Russian families, was a crucial tool in international efforts to locate, protect, and reunite them with their families.

Now - the State Department seems to have deleted the evidence of Russia's war crimes.

In a shocking decision, the administration has pulled funding for the research, citing a shift in priorities.

International organizations, human rights advocates, and Ukrainian officials have condemned the move, warning that it will make it harder to hold Russia accountable for its war crimes and could permanently separate children from their families.

Yale researchers were compiling the database, so the State Department could share this information with Europol and the International Criminal Court, which could eventually bring charges against Russian officials - NYT writes.

We cannot let these children be erased.

Sign this petition to demand the immediate restoration of the Yale Lab's database and full U.S. support for tracking and recovering abducted Ukrainian children.

The U.S. must stand against war crimes!