krainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and international partners attend the Canada-Ukraine co-chaired Leaders’ Summit on the return of Ukrainian children in New York on Sept. 23, 2025. Canada later disclosed funding for AI-driven tools aimed at helping trace Ukrainian children. FILE PHOTO.
Ottawa’s C$2 Million Tech Bet Shows How the Search Is Moving Beyond Diplomacy and Into Digital Tracing
By Sadaf Sundas Riaz | SCN NEWS
OTTAWA, Oct. 30, 2025 (SCN NEWS) — Canada is putting artificial intelligence into one of the most difficult searches of the Ukraine war, funding technology designed to track digital clues that could help locate children transferred to Russia and Russian-occupied territory. The C$2 million investment in Hala Systems marks a notable shift in Ottawa's campaign: after building an international coalition, recruiting mediators and pressing Moscow for information, Canada is also backing open-source intelligence to find evidence independently when conventional diplomacy cannot establish where a child has gone.
The scale of the problem explains why. Canadian government briefing material prepared for Parliament says Ukraine had reported 19,546 children unlawfully deported or transferred, although Ottawa cautioned that the figure was still being validated. About 1,700 had returned, including roughly 700 since Canada and Ukraine launched their international coalition in February 2024, leaving an enormous gap between the number of known or suspected cases and children actually brought home. The same Canadian assessment says returns have depended not just on government negotiations but on intermediary states such as Qatar, back-channel contacts and Ukrainian civil society — a patchwork of routes that underscores the absence of a single mechanism capable of resolving the cases.
The technology investment attacks a different part of that problem. Canada says its C$2 million contribution to Hala Systems supports AI-driven open-source intelligence intended to help locate and return Ukrainian children in Russia and occupied territories. Rather than waiting solely for Russian authorities to provide records, open-source investigations can potentially assemble publicly available digital traces from online material and other accessible information, helping investigators narrow searches or connect fragmented evidence. The Canadian documents do not suggest AI can independently verify every case or secure a return, but the investment shows Ottawa is treating the information gap itself as an operational problem rather than only a diplomatic dispute.
That distinction became harder to ignore after the Istanbul negotiations. Ukraine gave Russia an initial list of 339 children in June and formally requested their return; by August, Canada and its partners said Moscow had failed to respond meaningfully and demanded verifiable information on the children's whereabouts, health and legal status. The episode exposed a weakness in the strategy Canada had helped champion: naming individual children makes Russian cooperation measurable, but it does not provide independent access to the records, institutions or territories needed to determine what happened to them.
Ottawa is consequently pursuing several routes at once. Alongside the technology project, Canadian briefing material records C$10 million for UNICEF and C$15 million for the Project Fund for a Resilient Ukraine, with the latter covering several areas including child reintegration. At the September UN General Assembly, more than 50 delegations joined a Canada-Ukraine high-level meeting where partners pledged support for tracing, rehabilitation, psychosocial care and foster-care initiatives; Austria reconfirmed mediation efforts, Italy signalled willingness to work with the Vatican on returns, and the European Union and Andorra joined the coalition, bringing membership to 44 states and organizations.
The combination reveals how Canada's approach has changed since the Montréal conference a year earlier. The first phase was primarily diplomatic: build a coalition, recruit governments capable of talking to Moscow and keep child returns attached to wider discussions about prisoners, detainees and eventually a ceasefire. The newer approach is more operational, combining mediation with digital tracing, international organizations, sanctions and reintegration support. That does not eliminate dependence on Russia — locating a child is not the same as obtaining permission and documentation for a return — but it could reduce the extent to which Moscow controls the first and most basic question in a case: where is the child?
There are limits to what technology can solve, particularly in a conflict where identities, citizenship, guardianship and the circumstances of transfers are disputed. Russia rejects allegations that it has systematically abducted Ukrainian children and has described many transfers as evacuations from combat zones, while Ukraine and its partners accuse Russian authorities of unlawful deportation and forcible transfer. Any information generated through open sources would still need verification and would not by itself settle those legal disputes or produce safe access to a child. But Canada's investment points to a broader change in humanitarian diplomacy: when official channels do not provide enough information, governments are increasingly looking to technology and independent evidence to reconstruct what happened.
For Ottawa, that makes the C$2 million project more consequential than its size suggests. Canada has already demonstrated that it can bring dozens of governments into a room and secure declarations demanding children's return. The harder task is turning thousands of unresolved cases into verified identities, locations and routes home. After nearly two years of coalition-building, Canada is beginning to invest not only in asking Russia for answers, but in finding some of those answers another way.