Washington, DC
MR. DMITRY ANOPCHENKO: Ukrainians are actually worried about the deliberations on the aid package in the House of Representatives. Let me start with this, you're the most important person from all of us, do you have the hope that this endless saga is near to an end?
ADMINISTRATOR SAMANTHA POWER: Well, let me just say that hope alone is not a strategy. What President Biden and all of us are doing is working, literally 24/7, to get this supplemental package across the finish line. And let me just say to Ukrainians who are mystified by why it has taken so long – so are we. But there is an expression better late than never, and we do think that the introduction of this text, the concretization of the proposal that had already come through the Senate, with big bipartisan support, and the fact that this is now going to be put before the House of Representatives, it seems, is a very good sign. And we hope that, again, within days of passage of this bill, that we will be in a position to ramp up our programming, which I know is the concern of so many Ukrainians.
MR. ANOPCHENKO: The biggest concern is that if some delay will happen, for any reason, does it mean that the United States will not be able to support Ukraine at all?
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: We have now a path in the House, and we have the Speaker who has put his credibility and his leadership behind getting votes on these bills. And we have always felt like these bills are massively in the interest of the American people, massively in the interest of freedom, in the interests of standing up against aggression, in the interest of our own security, in the interest of our own values. And we have moved a substantial distance by now seeing the text of these bills finally being produced.
Concretely, what that means for USAID, and our partnership with the government of Ukraine, is once we work through the details and ability to resume what we did for so many months, which was provide monthly direct budget support to the government, we know that the government faces a $5 billion financing gap every single month to pay teachers, first responders, health workers. We have been, and the Ukrainians have been, relying on other countries to frontload their assistance to make up for the fact that the United States has not been able to continue that support while we have been stuck in Congress. So when this bill goes through, and I'm saying when and not if, we will be in a position to resume that assistance and other countries can return to their staggered contributions in a way that allows us to pool our resources in a manner that can be more sustainable over time.
MR. ANOPCHENKO: Could you give me a little bit more details? So which help, or which aid Ukraine might get from your Agency and from the United States?
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Well, the way I look at it for the people of Ukraine is there are four buckets that are captured in this National Security Supplemental. The first and the most urgent for people on the frontlines and for the people – for civilians who are being brutally attacked by Putin – is the military assistance. That is an incredibly important part of this package and it needs to be accelerated, it needs to move forward.
The second is direct budget support for the government because of the gap in financing that Ukraine is suffering because of the damage to the economy that Putin is intentionally causing.
The third is humanitarian assistance, 14.7 million Ukrainians are dependent on some financial support from the international community, whether that's cash voucher to be able to go to the market because they've lost their house, or they've lost their job, or they've lost all of the things that they had before the full-scale invasion, or whether that's psychosocial care for people who have suffered horrible trauma or have lost loved ones, whether that's educational support in the humanitarian space – that is humanitarian assistance and it's incredibly important. It's emergency assistance for people who can't go back to the life they had before February 2022.
The fourth bucket, which gets less attention but is really what USAID does every day is, for example, seeds, and fertilizer, and new equipment for Ukrainian farmers, or access to capital, low interest loans that allows the agricultural sector to continue its incredible progress getting Ukrainian agricultural products sold and in Ukraine, and feeding Ukrainians, and also exported, which has the double effect, of course, of helping feed the world, but also brings invaluable income for farmers and valuable tax revenue for the government.
Part of that fourth bucket, which we call development assistance, is also energy repairs. Boilers, auto transformers, pipes, you know, dozens and dozens of kilometers of pipes to do quick repairs or to support the brave Ukrainian workers who go out as soon as Putin hits energy infrastructure, they go out and they're ready to do repair. We have been supporting those repairs now for more than two years, and we want to be in a position to procure the kinds of equipment and the kinds of resources that those repair people need to be able to get energy infrastructure back up and running soon after an attack. So those are the four contents, you might say, of what is a $60 billion assistance package that is now pending, finally, before the House.
MR. ANOPCHENKO: I know that USAID is helping Ukraine to work with Nasdaq and with Bank of America. Can you give a little bit more details on this?
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Yes, to be clear, what we have announced together with our Ukrainian friends stands completely apart from what happens in Congress. So these are two new initiatives that are going to go forward no matter what. What we have done today is we have taken two steps, one with Nasdaq, in order to allow Ukrainian companies that want to go public for them to list, and go public using Nasdaq without having to pay some of those fees that are really prohibitive. I mean, Ukrainian companies are already dealing with missile fire. They shouldn't have to deal with fees on Nasdaq. It is important today already as a symbol to the American private sector that Ukraine is open for business.
So it's intrinsically important because of its effects it will have on the companies and their ability to list, but I think it can have cascading effects that are even bigger than that. With Bank of America, I sat down with the CEO of Bank of America about a year ago and he said, look, my heart is with Ukraine, we want to be able to help them. What we're hearing is that Ukrainian businesses are having trouble getting access to capital. And I said, “well, that's true. We have pools of capital that need to be accessible to them, but we also need project ready proposals to be brought forward so that investors who, their hearts are with Ukraine, but right now their money is not yet with Ukraine.” And so what we're doing is working with Bank of America. It's taken a while to get this organized, but we're going to have four very senior investment specialists from the Bank of America loaned to the Ministry of Economy.
MR. ANOPCHENKO: How do you see, the possible way, you know, to an end – and to have you heard, for example, about Zelensky's peace formula. So what might be helpful to end this terrible war?
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Well, I think the passage of the National Security Supplemental, which includes military assistance, economic assistance, and then this support for Ukraine's own economic resilience is really important for peace. I mean, it's ironic, right? And this is what Ukrainians have said from the very beginning, which is, security assistance is itself a form of humanitarian assistance. Security assistance saves lives. Patriot missiles save lives. Ammunition saves lives. That's not my job at USAID, I'm very committed to my job in the humanitarian and the economic space, but when Putin sees that we are standing together as a democratic world and that even though the United States wasn't able to be providing the assistance that we wanted to these last months, we had contributed an awful lot prior to that, and some of that has carried over – a lot of that has carried over.
But when Putin sees that he cannot outlast us, that is a much more auspicious circumstance to be discussing the – President Zelensky's peace formula, or any other peace proposal. When it comes to the content of that peace, we stand in support of our Ukrainian friends. And we are looking forward to seeing if the time is right, how those negotiations produce an outcome that works for the Ukrainian people. But right now, we know that it is important to negotiate from a position of strength and getting this military, economic, and humanitarian assistance flowing to the people of Ukraine at this very vital, very difficult moment for the people of Ukraine, that is our priority, and that itself will be a road to peace.