Biden orders U.S. to share evidence of Russian war crimes with International Criminal Court

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WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden has ordered the U.S. government to start sharing information about possible Russian war crimes in Ukraine with the International Criminal Court, a U.S. official familiar with the matter told NBC News on Wednesday. The decision, which was made in recent days and first reported by The New York Times, overrides months of resistance by the Pentagon. Biden previously said that Russian President Vladimir Putin has “clearly committed war crimes.” The U.S. is not a member of the ICC, and the Defense Department had previously blocked efforts to share evidence of war crimes. The Pentagon has had concerns that by working with the ICC, the U.S. could open the door to the prosecution of U.S. troops deployed abroad. The ICC, headquartered in The Hague, Netherlands, has investigated allegations of U.S. forces and the CIA committing war crimes in Afghanistan. In a statement Wednesday, a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council said the U.S. supports a "range of international investigations" to hold perpetrators responsible, including through the ICC, Office of the Ukraine Prosecutor General and the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission. "On the ICC specifically, we are not going to discuss the specifics on any cooperation, which is consistent with the Court’s practice of treating requests for cooperation in a confidential manner," the spokesperson said. "More broadly, we will keep working with Ukraine and other countries to expose the war crimes and atrocities that Russian forces and officials are committing for the world to see." The U.S. has deployed international investigators and prosecutors to help Ukraine's Office of the Prosecutor General prepare war crimes cases, the spokesperson said. In September of 2022, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Ukrainian Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin signed a memorandum of understanding for closer collaboration in identifying and prosecuting perpetrators of war crimes in Ukraine. In March, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Putin, a move that Biden called "justified," and said the Russian leader was responsible for illegally transferring children from Ukraine to Russia. Putin’s press secretary Dmitriy Peskov responded to the ICC at the time by saying: “We do not recognize this court, we do not recognize the jurisdiction of this court. This is how we treat this.”