The formal announcement is expected later in the day.
The group, called the International Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine, was established in July 2023 in The Hague with support from the European Commission and is hosted by Eurojust – the EU’s judicial cooperation agency.
It coordinates legal efforts among Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic States, and Romania to investigate Russia’s alleged crime of aggression.
Only non-European participant
The U.S. was the only non-European country collaborating with the center, having deployed a prosecutor to work alongside investigators from participating nations.
According to NYT, the Trump administration is also scaling back the work of the War Crimes Accountability Team formed in 2022 to coordinate Justice Department efforts to hold Russian perpetrators accountable.
In December 2023, U.S. prosecutors charged four Russian soldiers in absentia with torturing an American living in Ukraine’s Kherson region.
The crime of aggression is defined as a top-level political and military leadership’s initiation or execution of an act of aggression—such as invasion, occupation, or bombardment—against a sovereign state.
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Source: IAR, The New York Times