YuLin Zhen, Photography Editor

A lab at the Yale School of Public Health on Wednesday launched a web page soliciting donations to sustain its investigation into the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia, after Trump administration funding cuts threatened its ability to continue.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton LAW ’73 linked the Humanitarian Research Lab’s donation page in a post on X, urging people to chip in.

“Russia has abducted thousands of Ukrainian children, plunging families into every parent’s worst nightmare,” Clinton wrote. “Now, Trump cuts threaten to close a Yale center that helps bring these children home.”

Earlier on Wednesday, a group of 30 members of Congress led by Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat, sent a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio urging the State Department to “maintain funding” for the Humanitarian Research Lab’s Ukraine Conflict Observatory.

“We are part of a bipartisan effort to seek the relatively modest amount of appropriations necessary to continue this invaluable work during the next fiscal year. We ask that you utilize your authority to keep the Conflict Observatory open until our appropriation request can become law,” the letter read.

Nathaniel Raymond, the lab’s executive director, said that without alternative funding, the lab would have to shut down on July 1.

Established in 2022 with $6 million in federal funding, the lab compiles open-source intelligence and satellite imagery to examine humanitarian crises.

The Humanitarian Research Lab, or HRL, initially lost its federal funding in February during a round of cuts by the Trump administration. Funds were later reinstated for a 6-week period in late March to allow the lab to transfer research data and evidence to Ukrainian authorities and Europol, the law enforcement agency of the European Union. 

According to a Yale spokesperson, the lab has completed that transfer. 

“It’s deeply meaningful to all of us at the lab at HRL to see the support that we’re getting at this hour,” Caitlin Howarth, the lab’s director of conflict analytics, said in a phone interview with the News. 

“Children shouldn’t be getting abducted in the course of war,” she added, “and it’s why we’re fighting as hard as we can to keep this investigation going.”

In a press release accompanying their letter, the 30 lawmakers argued that even though the lab’s data is preserved, Ukrainian authorities and Europol lack the expertise and resources to navigate the lab’s methods and Russian websites to locate missing children.

In a previous letter on May 14 to the a subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations, Doggett and 51 other lawmakers from both parties called for $8 million to be allocated to the State Department to collect, analyze, and preserve evidence related to the abduction of children from Ukraine — money that would be used to fund the Humanitarian Research Lab.

When asked on Monday about Yale’s involvement in the future funding of the lab, the University spokesperson wrote to the News that it is “actively pursuing alternate funding sources” and “recognizes the vital importance of HRL’s mission and the impact of its open-source intelligence and data analysis.”

The University spokesperson said Yale is “not in a position” to comment on federal funding, but noted that the future of the lab depends on the approval of additional funding, including “prospective support currently under review in Europe.” 

The spokesperson did not respond directly when asked whether the University itself would fund the lab in place of the government.

The lab’s research has backed up the International Criminal Court’s March 2023 arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is accused of unlawfully deporting children from occupied regions of Ukraine to Russia.

“We’ve documented the transportation routes that the children are taken through using satellite imagery, we watch the planes, and we track them,” Raymond told the News. “It’s the largest kidnapping in history since World War II.”

While their work to date has mainly focused on criminal accountability, the lab is now shifting its focus to supporting search, rescue and recovery efforts, according to Raymond.

Olha Tytarenko, a senior lector of Slavic languages and literatures at Yale, wrote to the News that the disruption in the lab’s research reduces the response to crimes such as human trafficking to “mere voices crying in the desert.”

“As someone who studies the preservation and erasure of cultural identity, I see this research as essential infrastructure for truth-telling in an era where disinformation threatens to obscure historical reality,” Tytarenko wrote.

Howarth, the conflict analytics director, said the lab is still working on material that has not been made public and does not want to leave that work “on the cutting board.”

Raymond emphasized that without the lab some of its humanitarian work, even beyond Ukraine, would be left undone.

“The issue is the children in Ukraine who are not going to come home, and the villages in Sudan that are being burnt to the ground by rapid support forces, with no one there to witness it from space,” he said.

The Humanitarian Research Lab’s office is located in the School of Public Health building at 60 College St.

Correction, June 12: A previous version of this article misspelled Olha Tytarenko’s name.