WILLIE GEIST: Welcome back to Morning Joe. Joining us now, Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development Samantha Power. Ambassador Power, good morning, it’s good to see you.
You’ve been over to the border with Ukraine a couple of times, right at the dawn of the war in those early days and then again last weekend with President Biden. You’ve seen with your own eyes what’s happening as more than four million refugees stream out of that country. In the course of your diplomatic career, you’ve been to some very difficult places. Tell us what you saw over there and what America needs to do further here.
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Well, you’re right that I’ve traveled twice and got to see a little bit of the early chaos as people crushed up against the border and had to wait three, four days even to get into neighboring countries. Now, that system is much better organized, there are people to greet them, they are taken to someone’s home. But the inn is filling up, you might say. I mean, people have been so unbelievably generous opening up their homes and they’re starting to run out of room, particularly in the big cities, in a country like Poland that has taken two and a half million Ukrainian refugees so far.
So that’s one dimension of it. And it’s mainly of course women and children as people have heard. And that creates all kinds of new challenges: “ok I want to work, I have a work permit because the EU has been gracious enough to change all the rules and make it possible for people who are fleeing to work and to get benefits. But if I work, what happens to my three kids?” Because there’s no husband, no father to rely upon, no community to fall back on by and large. So that’s for refugees inside Europe.
And then of course inside Ukraine, further inside Europe you might say, the number one issue really is the besieged areas. And the fact that President Putin and his forces just are not allowing food, medicine, fuel, and at the same time shelling them to smithereens. I mean, 82 attacks on hospital facilities, more than 500 on educational facilities, and again that encirclement and that attempt to use civilians and their pain and their starvation to try to extract surrenders. So far it’s not working, it puts an enormous amount of pressure on political leaders who of course want to defend the territory, but at the same time we’re seeing their people experiencing suffering that we haven’t seen since World War II.
GEIST: And President Biden, as you know, has rallied the West, whether it’s on economic sanctions that has crippled the Russian economy, whether it’s getting military equipment into Ukraine to help them fight Russia. What about on the humanitarian side? What does that effort look like from the United States point of view and what’s still out there for us to do there?
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Well, I want to stress again, there’s assistance, and then there’s pressure and policy. So on the assistance front, while President Biden was in Europe, he announced appropriation on the U.S. part to provide a billion dollars in humanitarian assistance. We’ve already expended hundreds of millions to organizations like the World Food Programme, UNHCR, and others. But a billion dollars is going to be a lot of resources. The key again though, is not just how much food do we have, how much medicine is stockpiled, on that score, I think we’re in a decent place. The key is how do we get these brutal Russian forces to let that food into people who need it. And that is where diplomatic pressure, the full-court press along the lines that we’ve seen for the sanctions and for the condemnation, and for isolating Russia. We now need something comparable where everywhere a Russian official goes, irrespective of who they talk to, whether it’s a friend or partner like China, whether it’s a country like India, or Gulf states where relationship continues in certain ways. Every single one of those phone calls needs to involve someone saying “let the food in, let the medicine in” and so not just a generic global call for that but specific diplomacy oriented around these besieged areas.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Ambassador Power, I know you spent some time with my brother and also members of the U.S. military who are trying to create an environment for the hundreds of thousands, millions of people amassed at the border. Can you explain what that entails, what you saw?
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Well, first of all, let me just say as an American citizen, also an immigrant to this country, how just amazing it is to see your brother, Mark, in action, to have an American ambassador to Poland speaking fluent Polish, talking to officials and families who are hosting Ukrainians in their native tongue, it is just the best we can present
BRZEZINSKI: Thank you.
AMBASSADOR POWER: It is the best ambassadorial face that we can offer and I think it’s been amazing to see the U.S.-Polish partnership, which has always been strong, but the ways in which it has now manifested in this show of solidarity towards Ukrainians in their greatest hour of need. With regard to the military, they’re mainly there as you know, in show of assurance and deterrence and so this is a humanitarian operation, that is very distinctly and discreetly humanitarian, where anything in the security space is in its own channel and it’s very important that we not mix those and that’s something again that Ambassador Brzezinski has pushed hard on as well. But I mean, you see that, all dimensions of U.S. foriegn policy and all dimensions of policy in those front line states being brought to bear. From the social services and the education to actually needing to be in a position to be sure there is sufficient readiness because of course Putin has proven himself not exactly acting in the interest of his own people.
JONATHAN LEMIRE: Ambassador Power, good morning, it’s Jonathan Lemire. Much has been of course noted about the ripple effects from this war on the rest of the globe. A lot on energy and energy prices, but there’s also concerns, growing concerns, about a lack of food. Because Ukraine and Russia, breadbaskets of much of Europe and beyond, how concerned are you about food scarcity, there are some reports that it might be the greatest since WWII and what can be done about it? Who’s going to be impacted and how can we help?
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Thanks. Well, first on the state of play, it’s grim. I mean, just to give you one example: 85 percent of Egypt’s grains come from Ukraine; 81 percent of Lebanon’s grains come from Ukraine. And this plays itself out all around the world. The head of the IMF actually, the first week of the invasion said, I thought something very memorable and important, which is “war in Ukraine means hunger in Africa.” And we’re already seeing that.
I’ve had meetings with people who are in charge of the kinds of innovations or try to get those kinds of drought resistant seeds and greater crop production going at a faster pace. I had meetings just this week to try to push that agenda. But we also need those countries that have large grain reserves to release those reserves on the global market. It’s almost analogous to the debates we have about fuel prices, about who can release more reserves so there’s more supply so the prices go down. Because every dollar now, because the prices are skyrocketing not only in terms of fuel, not only in terms of fertilizer, but also in terms of the grains themselves that means that a dollar is going to buy much less when it comes to humanitarian assistance but that also that farmers who used to be able to count on being able to buy “x” amount of fertilizer can now buy a third of that.
And we’re already seeing actually riots where farmers are demanding government subsidies to help support them as prices are spiraling upwards. And so again, everything is connected to everything else. Global stability turns on a certain amount of food being in the ecosystem. And so we need to look at humanitarian assistance as a stopgap but we really, again, need more supply on the market. And those of us who do produce, bringing that to bear to try to ameliorate the situation.
MS. BRZEZINSKI: Administrator for the United States Agency for International Development, USAID, Samantha Power thank you so much for being on this morning. We appreciate everything you’re doing.