New York, NY
ALEX WAGNER: As the head of USAID, the country's Agency for International Development, in recent weeks Administrator Power has been traveling from crisis point to crisis point around the world, to places where a combination of natural and political disasters have wrecked infrastructure and caused dangerous food insecurity. And all of it is aggravated by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, not to mention climate change. And Samantha Power brings to this role a very particular history. She served in the Obama administration on the National Security Council, and then as Obama's Ambassador to the United Nations. But even before that, she was widely recognized as one of the world's experts on war crimes and genocide, and bringing the perpetrators of those kinds of atrocities to justice. And at this precarious moment for Ukraine and the world, Samantha Power is here, in New York, where world leaders are gathering for the UN General Assembly and I'm very pleased to say she joins me in the studio now. Samantha Power, USAID Administrator, Madam Administrator, Samantha Power, my friend, it's great to see you there.
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: It’s great to see you.
WAGNER: It’s – I’m going to say – a sort of terrifying time in the world and I want to first start with Ukraine and those images of Izyum, the digging up of graves and the atrocities that look to have been committed there. Do you think, and this is as someone who has written the book on this and who understands this issue in a deeply emotionally granular way, do you think there's a chance that Putin will be held accountable for this, or anybody will be held accountable?
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: It's a great question. And certainly those images – those lives – cry out for accountability, now from the grave. I'd say that this was the biggest worry all along with this conflict, is that you would combine a capacity for atrocities that Putin had already shown himself capable of – in places like Aleppo, teaming up with the Assad regime or backing Assad as he gassed people to death – with the military prowess of a superpower. When you see the lines being pushed back, and every time they are pushed back, you see the stakes of this conflict. And in terms of the accountability question, all I can speak to is from my own experience, being in Bosnia, where again, you had similar atrocities, mass graves, targeted attacks, use of sexual violence, the killing of children, along with elderly men and women, and the perpetrators just strutted around with that sense of impunity that you see in the territories that Russian forces have occupied, and you have seen in Crimea and Donbas since 2014. And it was Milosevic – these names now became kind of iconic, associated with war crimes – Mladic, Karadzic, and they were so smug and they were so sure, and all the international community could do and did, led by the U.S., was to document the war crimes, painstakingly interview the survivors, those scenes that we see in Izyum today and then in Bucha not long ago. Those are the same scenes we saw play out and people wonder, will it ever go to any constructive use. But even in recent weeks, when you hear grumblings of discontent in Moscow, you start to imagine a scenario where at some point there'll be different leadership in Russia, just by definition, the actuarial tables are such that that will happen at some point, no matter what.
And so, life is long. Certainly the sanctions, the export controls, all of those other punishments that have been put in place. Accountability becomes part and parcel to any scenario, even after peace agreements, where those things get re-examined or loosened. And so, the incentive structure changes over time and it's up to the United States and other countries to stick together, and to continue to not only document and put yourself in the position to hold people accountable but see the International Criminal Court process through, see the UN Human Rights Council process through, support the OSCE, support – we at USAID support Ukrainian NGOs on the ground who now have set up 22 offices across the country, just painstakingly documenting case after case, and there are 15,000 incidents of war crimes that have been documented so far.
WAGNER: Yeah, I think Ukraine's top prosecutors said that they've identified 34,000 potential war crimes, which is just a staggering number. And I think that – I mean, that number alone, can, I think, cause some people to be defeatist. I know you're hopeful, you're pragmatic as well, time is – marches forward, regimes change, but I wonder how much you think disinformation and the current Russians posture is a different calculation than the sort of posture of genocidal leaders in the late 90s, right? We are living in a time where the Russians can literally take the stance that none of this is happening. All of this talk about whether it's war crimes or food insecurity, grain shortages caused by Putin's war in Ukraine, “that's a confection of the West, that's not real,” that ability to do that and say that and have people believe them, seems like a new development. Or do you think the practice of misinformation may be different, through different channels, but ultimately is the same as it was?
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Well, I'd say that, there's various countries, especially those involved in conflict, who have a history of misinformation. What's different is the hundreds of millions of dollars the Russians are investing in media penetration around the world. And having traveled, for example, to Kenya to Somalia to Zambia to Malawi to Sri Lanka to Pakistan, just in the last couple of months, I've seen again, the information overload by the Russian Federation through RT and Sputnik and these other media, but I don't really get the sense that many people are buying it.
Now, one piece of evidence came early in the conflicts, getting 141 votes to condemn the Russian invasion at the United Nations. This may not sound like a lot, there are 193 countries in the UN, but I know firsthand from working there, most countries want to duck when a hard vote comes up. 141 countries stuck their heads up – even though there was coercion and intimidation, harassment, claims that resources were going to be cut off – they still took that stand, and many countries who abstained and didn't want to stay on the sidelines and didn't want to antagonize Putin, of all people, you talk to them privately, and they're horrified. Because every country has an interest in territorial integrity being sacred, and in one country not lopping off part of the neighbor militarily. And as quaint as that can sound in an era where Putin is seeking to do just that, I do think it explains, even the recent statements by Prime Minister Modi, by President Xi, and others. There's a lot of discomfort even among those countries that are, you know, whose publics are imbibing Russian misinformation, as is occurring of course in China, but still the leaders have a sense that there's something awful, and massively destabilizing that one country has done to another, and thus, to the international system.
WAGNER: The fact that Xi and Modi are speaking out, in their way, about this is significant. I have 1,000 other questions to ask you, but we don't have time for them. I want you to come back so we could talk about Pakistan, and climate change, and how up to the job our aid systems are, in terms of the crises we face as a globe. I know that you're in town for the UN General Assembly, we thank you for taking some time out of your very busy and important schedule to share your thoughts with us. Thanks for your time.
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Great to be with you, Alex.
WAGNER: USAID Administrator or USUN Ambassador Samantha Power, thanks again.