US withdraws from international center investigating Russian crimes during war in Ukraine

The Justice Department has notified European officials that the United States is withdrawing from a multinational center set up to investigate leaders responsible for the invasion of Ukraine, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Justice Department said. The New York Times.

Photo: Alexskopje | Dreamstime.com

The withdrawal was announced in a letter sent March 17 to members of the International Center for the Investigation of Aggression Against Ukraine (ICPA), which the Biden administration appointed in 2023. Trump’s decision was another sign that his administration is moving away from President Joseph Biden’s policy of holding Putin personally accountable for crimes against Ukrainians.

The center was created to hold Russia's leadership, as well as its allies in Belarus, Iran, and North Korea, accountable for crimes that qualify as aggression under international law and treaties. Aggression is defined as violating the sovereignty of another state without the need for self-defense.

On the subject: War in numbers: how Ukraine has changed in three years of full-scale Russian invasion

“The US authorities have informed me that they will end their participation in the ICPA by the end of March,” wrote Michael Schmid, president of the European Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation, better known as Eurojust, which oversees the center.

Schmid said the ICPA remains "fully committed" to holding those responsible for major international crimes in Ukraine accountable.

The United States was the only country outside Europe to send a senior prosecutor to The Hague to work with investigators from Ukraine, the Baltic states, Poland, Romania and the International Criminal Court.

The Trump administration is also scaling back the War Crimes Accountability Group, a team of veteran prosecutors created in 2022 by then-Attorney General Merrick B. Garland to coordinate the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute Russians involved in atrocities committed after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago.

"There is no safe haven for war criminals," Garland said when the group was created.

He said the department would "use all possible mechanisms to hold accountable those who commit war crimes and other atrocities in Ukraine."

Under the Biden administration, the group, known as WarCAT, played a critical support role, providing logistical support to overburdened Ukrainian prosecutors and law enforcement, training, and helping Ukrainian courts prepare indictments for Russian war crimes.

The group won a landmark case. In December 2023, U.S. prosecutors, using the war crimes law for the first time in nearly three decades, charged four Russian servicemen in absentia with torturing an American living in Ukraine (in the Kherson region).

President Trump has recently become increasingly close to Putin, clashing with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, even publicly and baselessly claiming that Ukraine provoked Russia's brutal and illegal military invasion.

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“You should never have started this,” Trump told Ukrainian leaders in February. “You could have made a deal.”

He later took to social media to call Zelensky a "dictator without elections" and said he was "terribly bad at his job."

The Trump administration has not explained why it pulled out of the investigative group, or rather, it has given the standard explanation: it needs to reallocate resources, people familiar with the situation said on condition of anonymity.

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