March 17, 2025, 11:29 a.m.
(The occupiers' torture chamber in Kherson. Photo: SBU)
TheUnited States is leaving the International Center for the Prosecution of Crimes of Aggression against Ukraine (ICPA) and is reducing the work of the War Crimes Investigation Team.
According to The New York Times, the United States is to officially notify its partners of its withdrawal from the center and reduce its participation in the investigation of war crimes committed by Russians in Ukraine in a letter to be sent on March 17.
The United States joined the center in 2023, and the war crimes investigation team was created by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland at the beginning of the great war in 2022. One of the achievements of the latter group is the indictment in absentia of four Russian soldiers who may have tortured an American in the Kherson region.
The Trump administration has not yet provided any reasons for leaving the investigative team, other than the explanation of the need to reallocate resources. The United States was the only country outside of Europe that cooperated with European law enforcement to prosecute those responsible for war crimes in Ukraine.
The journalists believe that these decisions "are the latest evidence that the Trump administration is backing away from President Biden Jr.'s commitment to hold Putin personally accountable."
In the year since the EU launched the International Center for the Prosecution of Crimes of Aggression against Ukraine on the basis of Eurojust, two thousand files of evidence have been submitted from at least 14 countries.
Earlier, the U.S. Department of Government Effectiveness (DOGE), headed by multibillionaire Elon Musk, stopped funding the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, a team at Yale University that helped rescue hundreds of Ukrainian children abducted by Russia. Before that, the International Criminal Court prosecutor Kareem Khan, who issued the arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin, was placed on President Trump's sanctions list.
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