Interview Transcript
HOST (in studio):
Interviewee: Nathaniel Raymond, on phone, Executive Director of Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale School of Public Health
Date: 23 August 2025
[BRUNHUBER] On that, I'm joined by Nathaniel Raymond. He's the executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health. It documents alleged violations of international law and war crimes by Russia aligned forces in Ukraine as part of a Conflict Observatory program, and joins us by phone. Thank you so much for being here with us. So your team are tracking tens of thousands of Ukrainian children taken by Russia. As I mentioned, both President Trump and the First Lady are calling for their return. But Trump's administration just cut your government funding. So walk us through what that means for your ability to to document these cases.
[RAYMOND] Well, what it means is that right now we're running on fumes. If it wasn't for online donations by average Americans, we would be out of business. But now we have the help of thousands of ordinary Americans been able to get back in the fight. And we're tracking locations where children are held trying to update those numbers for the Ukrainian government as quickly as possible. We think there could be as many as 200 locations where children are held. Over 3500 miles inside Russia from the Black Sea, near occupied Crimea, all the way to the Pacific.
[BRUNHUBER] Now, I mean, as you say, I mean, it's a race against time in a way. If your lab has to shut down or scale back dramatically, what happens to the so [sic] many families who are still searching for their kids?
[RAYMOND] How do they get answers well, the short answer is, unfortunately, they don't. Right now, the work that we're doing at the Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale is critical for supporting Ukrainian efforts across multiple agencies to do three critical tasks one to get a new number of the total amount of kids that we think are in Russia's custody. And right now, our internal assessment is the number is probably closer to 35,000. The second big task we're working with Ukrainians to accomplish is to identify children by name, which is extremely difficult because they're hidden in Russian adoption websites. In many cases often presented as if they were Russian orphans, not what they are—Ukrainian. And the third task is to figure out where Russia has moved them. They're basically playing a shell game like a ping pong ball underneath a plastic cup, moving the children around it, making it harder for us to detect where they are and how many they have.
[BRUNHUBER] And when you when you list all those challenges, it sounds like an almost impossible task. I mean, it's incredible. Up to 35,000 children. I mean, your team can can document where these kids are if you're successful. But how does anyone actually bring them home then?
[RAYMOND] Well, that is the million ruble question. Really, the American role can't be overstated here. President Trump has an opportunity to really follow the lead of his party in Congress. Republican Senators Grassley, Ernst and Wicker have presented a resolution in the Senate that makes the return of these children a precondition for any successful negotiation. The President, with the help of the First Lady, can take a major leadership role here and make a difference for these kids and their families by making their return a bottom dollar requirement for any negotiations.
[BRUNHUBER] Yeah. I mean, surely if there is any issue that is bipartisan, you'd think it would be this one. You talk about the negotiations. I mean, there's talk of this, you know, potential peace deals that could involve territory swaps with Russia, meaning that, you know, Ukraine would have to give up more of its land to, to get some of it back. But if that happens, does it become even harder to to locate and recover these children absolutely.
[RAYMOND] Because let's talk about the heart of the matter here and what's at stake in the issue of Ukraine's abducted children. It's not just about children abducted in this war from Ukraine. It's really about the meaning of the special protected status. Children have underneath the Geneva convention, which means they can't be traded as hostages or in a spy exchange. Children must be returned immediately with no preconditions. That's what the law says. If we put kids on the table here and trade them like poker chips in a dangerous card game, we're setting a tremendously disturbing and catastrophic precedent for all the wars of the future, meaning that kids can be taken to be used as hostages, just as Putin has done here.
[BRUNHUBER] I talked about this being a race against time. Do you have a firm date as to when you have enough money to, to, to continue until.
[RAYMOND] Right now we can make it to January 1st. And so we are going to act like January 2nd will happen somehow some way. At the moment we have to move as quickly as possible because these kids, some were taken as young as eight months and now they're approaching four years old and going to kindergarten.
[BRUNHUBER] Yeah. Just so tragic. Really appreciate you speaking to us about this, Nathaniel Raymond with the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health. Thank you so much for joining us.
[RAYMOND] Thank you, sir.