The US has informed its partners of the decision to withdraw from the International Center for the Investigation of Crimes of Aggression against Ukraine, which the Biden administration joined in 2023, reports The New York Times.
The group was created to hold the leadership of Russia, as well as its allies Belarus, North Korea, and Iran, accountable for the category of crimes defined as aggression under international law and treaties, which violate the sovereignty of another country and are not initiated for self-defense. The United States was the only country outside Europe that cooperated with the group, sending a senior Justice Department prosecutor to The Hague to work with investigators from Ukraine, the Baltic countries, and Romania.
According to the publication's sources, the decision will be officially announced on Monday in an email to employees and members of the group's parent organization — the European Union Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation, better known as Eurojust.
Additionally, as NYT writes, the Trump administration is also reducing the work of its own group for holding accountable for war crimes, created in 2022 by Attorney General Merrick Garland. It was supposed to coordinate the Justice Department's efforts to hold Russians accountable for crimes committed after the invasion of Ukraine three years ago.
Under the Biden administration, the team, known as WarCAT, focused on an important auxiliary role: providing overwhelmed Ukrainian prosecutors and law enforcement agencies with logistical support, training, and direct assistance in transferring charges of war crimes committed by Russians to Ukrainian courts. In December 2023, American prosecutors, for the first time since the adoption of the war crimes law almost three decades ago, used it to indict four Russian soldiers in absentia for torturing an American living in the Kherson region of Ukraine.
According to the publication's sources, the Trump administration did not explain the reason for withdrawing from the investigative group, other than what was typical for other personnel and political moves: the need to reallocate resources.