President Trump promised to address the issue of Ukraine’s missing and abducted children by Russia during a call with President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday, despite the halting of U.S. funding for an investigation into identifying them.

The issue is at the center of an international war crimes arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin and one of his top officials.

“President Trump promised to work closely with both parties to help make sure those children were returned home,” national security adviser Mike Waltz and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a joint statement.

Zelensky, in a statement following the call, said he raised with Trump “the return of Ukrainian children who were taken by Russian forces.”

While Rubio had earlier said the Ukrainians “need to get the children back,” as part of any peace settlement, the Trump administration halted funding for a key U.S. program investigating and identifying children who disappeared from Ukraine into Russia.

“The funding has been cut based on the assessments we have been making regarding a whole host of funding, if it worked within our framework of America’s interest,” State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in a response to a question Wednesday.

Bruce indicated that Trump personally addressing the issue of Ukraine’s children with Zelensky overrides any funding cuts to specific programs.

“I think that’s a pretty good, clear indication that we can still work on issues that matter and make them happen without it being in a certain structure that has existed,” she said.

The investigations were carried out by the Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL). In a report presented to the United Nations Security Council in December, the HRL said it identified 314 Ukrainian children placed in a “systematic, Kremlin-directed program of coerced adoption and fostering.”

The New Republic reported that the Trump administration also blocked sharing the HRL’s sensitive data with European law enforcement as part of investigations into Russia’s alleged systematic kidnappings.

A group of bipartisan lawmakers wrote to Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Wednesday raising alarm over the Trump administration’s “reduction in American leadership in countering these crimes.”