The Trump administration’s moratorium on US foreign aid initiatives is jeopardising efforts to investigate and document Russian war crimes in Ukraine, Reuters reported on Tuesday, citing a number of sources and a Ukrainian government paper on US funding cuts.
According to Reuters, six US-funded projects with remits including documenting war crimes, fighting corruption, and reforming Ukraine’s criminal justice system were at risk following the 90-day funding freeze announced by Washington last month.
Of the six projects, which receive a total of $89 million in funding from USAID, the US Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement and the Department of State each year, almost half of which is “directly allocated to war crimes accountability”, at least five have already had their funding frozen, Reuters said.
As a result of the cuts, the US-funded Atrocity Crimes Advisory Group for Ukraine has been forced to cut almost a third of the 150 legal experts it employs to advise Ukraine’s Prosecutor’s Office, Reuters said, while the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union had been forced to work in a “limited way” after losing around 75% of its annual budget.
“While the programmes do not directly impact Ukraine’s frontline efforts to fend off Russia’s onslaught, supporters say they represent the best chance of extensively documenting reported battlefield atrocities in Europe’s biggest conflict since World War II”, Reuters said.
On Friday, Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Minister Olha Stefanishyna said that Kyiv was working to find new sources of funding to sustain “critical” programmes previously funded by USAID.
The Trump administration’s freeze on foreign aid programmes in January was initially feared to have ended all US military aid to Ukraine, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky later confirmed that that was not the case.
Ukraine has opened over 140,000 cases into war crimes committed by Russian forces since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of the country in February 2022, Reuters said.
Last week, the Council of Europe hailed what it called a “major step” towards the creation of a special tribunal to prosecute Russian war crimes in Ukraine after reaching an agreement on the proposed tribunal’s legal foundations.