Dr. Dafna Rand, the director of the State Department’s Office of Foreign Assistance, speaks on Turkey, Russia and Ukraine. Excerpts:
U.S. and USAID’s response to the terrible earthquake in Türkiye and Syria
First, I just want to say to the people who are watching and to all of you how much the American people are with you and how much we are with all of the victims’ families in this terrible, terrible tragedy. The United States, the United States Government, will continue to support the people of Türkiye and Syria, and we are welcoming and continue to welcome and encourage support from all of the international community and all of our partners at this time.
As you all know, last week we announced $85 million of new humanitarian assistance to immediately respond, and we are working very closely with the Turkish Government authorities and local authorities and our NGO partners. We have hundreds of additional U.S. personnel that are arriving in the region to help save lives and assist those in need. We have mobilized a DART team, which stands for a Disaster Assistance and Response Team, a DART team, which is hard at work in southern Türkiye as we speak.
Two of our most highly trained urban search and rescue teams have been deployed from the United States, and they are on the ground conducting efforts and operations with Turkish officials and Turkish rescue efforts in the region of Adiyaman, which is one of the hardest-hit areas. And we’re very proud of their work; they’re going 24 hours without sleeping, working really hard. These teams have specialized equipment and they have canines for search and rescue operations; and joining them is a whole team of emergency response managers, hazardous material technicians, engineers, logisticians, paramedics, and planners that are working, again, hand in glove with other partners and the Turkish officials.
We had existing humanitarian partners on the ground in Syria who immediately, within hours of the earthquake, responded in northwest Syria, U.S. partners that have gone back to the beginning of the civil war providing humanitarian assistance. They are and continue to provide critical emergency relief in northwest Syria, including food, water, shelter, medical care, and U.S. helicopters in the Turkish area are conducting airlift operations, transporting the injured to rescue sites around the country.
Relief supplies
Just today we have airlifted 18 metric tons of critical relief supplies for the hard-hit Kahramanmaras region – I hope I pronounced that correctly – in southern Türkiye, and this includes materials for tents for emergency shelter relief; that is one of the problems and the challenges for the survivors, is where to sleep. This is a priority. There are thousands of displaced families all over southern Türkiye. The new equipment includes hygiene supplies to keep people safe and to – and materials to stop the risk of infectious diseases, which we’re worried about. These outbreaks can quickly take over in these type of emergency situation.
We will continue to expand our humanitarian efforts in northwest Syria. We – in this regard, we are grateful to the Government of Türkiye for their efforts in reopening the Bab al-Hawa crossing, and UN partners are now using three border crossings. We in the United States are working at the UN, and we are pushing for a UN Security Council resolution that will urgently authorize these three border crossings. This is critical, to open the two additional crossings from Türkiye to northwest Syria to allow in an expanded relief operation. We call on the Assad regime to immediately allow aid in through all border crossings to allow the distribution of aid to all affected areas and to all Syrians, and to let humanitarian access across Syria without exception.
About Ukraine
This has been an ongoing effort of myself personally and my office, the Office of Foreign Assistance, since before Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine last February. Our office manages all foreign assistance across State and USAID, and we were planning for the invasion last winter and worked with Congress, as everyone knows, for a full-scale response since February 24th, 2022, so we’re nearing the one-year anniversary of that terrible day. The Biden administration and U.S. Congress have provided State and USAID over $45 billion. This is a tremendous, generational, historic investment.
And it includes many different components that we have overseen at the State Department and USAID. I want to give you some of the updates of where we are with some of this assistance, but overall, since last year, as folks here know, we have undertaken humanitarian efforts, economic support efforts, security assistance efforts, and we have used this assistance to help our – to mobilize and encourage other partners to support the Government of Ukraine and the people of Ukraine.
Energy infrastructure
So this assistance we’re providing will also secure Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, and that’s something that I want to highlight today, and help Ukraine and other partners in the region, including Moldova, stabilize their economies, prepare for a broader recovery, and support your – their path – the European paths.
In late December, and this is the news part – in late December, Congress passed what we’re calling the fourth supplemental. This is a big supplemental appropriation that gave State and USAID nearly 30 billion more dollars to support Ukraine and its neighbors. And I want to run through some of what we’re doing with that supplemental funding.
First, this funding has – allows us to continue our budgetary support to the Government of Ukraine, and working with Congress we are providing much more in the coming months. We have – since the full-scale invasion, the U.S. has provided $13 billion in budget support to the Government of Ukraine, and working with Congress in the coming months we plan on providing $9.9 billion. And we remain committed to working with the Government of Ukraine to maintain its operational capacity and to provide additional budget support as necessary.
Now, this funding is doing so much. And just a few examples: It is alleviating, obviously, the acute budget deficit on the Government of Ukraine that was caused by Putin’s brutal war, but it’s keeping basic government services functioning, like hospitals, schools, and utilities. This funding is supporting teachers, firefighters, first responders across Ukraine that are saving the lives of Ukrainian citizens every single day.
The fourth supplemental also had a focus on energy, and I want to announce and commend our work in supporting the – with $270 million in new assistance to help repair, maintain, and strengthen Ukraine’s power sector, which has been attacked brutally by Russian forces. We will continue to identify additional support with our allies and partners.
And then finally, I want to talk a little bit – this new assistance will offer new abilities to provide humanitarian assistance. Specifically, there are explosives that remain very hazardous across Ukraine, and this assistance will help us remove these hazards because they are blocking access to farmlands and they are slowing the distribution of humanitarian assistance. They are impeding the reconstruction efforts across Ukraine. The Government of Ukraine has estimated that now 160,000 square kilometers of its land is now contaminated by these explosive hazards. So we are working with this fourth supplemental to remove these hazards.
We salute the armed forces of Ukraine and all of its citizens continue to inspire the world with tremendous skill and profound courage, and I should note that we also applaud and thank other partners of ours and of Ukraine for stepping up and providing complementary assistance.
Congress and Ukraine
We’re also supporting the people of Ukraine through a new authority that Congress gave us in late December. On December 29th, the President signed into law the Additional Ukraine Supplemental Act, and in it there was a new authority that allowed the Department of Justice to transfer assets forfeited by a KleptoCapture Task Force – this is DOJ’s new KleptoCapture Task Force – that is capturing assets from kleptocrats and is able to transfer those funds to the State Department, to our office, to then be used on behalf of the people of Ukraine. This task force is remarkable, and I just thank our colleagues at the Department of Justice; they are dedicated to enforcing the sweeping sanctions, export restrictions, and economic counter-measures that the U.S. has imposed in response to Russia’s unprovoked military campaign.
So just this month we are pleased to announce that in the first asset recovery, $5.4 million were captured by the KleptoCapture Task Force, and it was a proceeds of a scheme to evade U.S. sanctions imposed by a close ally of Putin’s. His name is Konstanin Malofeev, and he has sought for many years to destabilize Eastern Europe through financing paramilitary groups in Ukraine and in other parts of Europe. We were able to seize 5.4 of these million dollars of his, transfer them – we’re in the process of transferring them to the State Department, and we are intending to use them to support the people of Ukraine, particularly focusing on veterans.
$85 million
I can talk a little bit of what the $85 million is doing. The U.S. – the humanitarian assistance goes to nongovernmental organizations and partners in Türkiye and Syria, including to some extent UN organizations. So – and we are working with our UN partners to see how much more money that they need in both Türkiye and Syria. So that is an ongoing conversation with organizations like the IOM, the International Organization of Migration, and UNHCR. So we are continuing to discuss with them their needs as they assess in the stage of recovery what they will need, and we expect that we will need and want to support them further.
In terms of the $85 million, it’s spread out across the earthquake-affected area. It is being provided to a range of partners. It is, again, nongovernmental funding. Many of these partners in Syria were already on the ground, which we’re very lucky in some sense. In Türkiye, the organizations that are working are familiar to the Government of Türkiye, and they’re working hand-in-hand with the Government of Türkiye. They’re disaster experts and relief experts.
And again, we’re shifting to a moment here on the humanitarian relief where we’re really trying to help the tens of thousands of families who’ve been displaced, including the many, many children. There are significant medical needs among both the displaced and those who were injured in the earthquake. And so a bulk of the funding is going to the medical needs, a bulk is going to these temporary shelters in Türkiye to help emergency shelters that need to withstand a very, very cold winter. As folks know, it’s very cold right now in Türkiye and in Syria.
So that is what the bulk of the funding is going to right now. The search and rescue funding also – that will eventually morph into a stabilization effort. So we are – we expect that we will have more announcements and more efforts as we’re going to need to go in and help stabilize, especially with some more – working hand-in-glove with government officials in the local area. But right now the humanitarian assistance is focused – spread out across Syria and Türkiye with nongovernmental partners on the areas that I described.
Accountability
I will tell you that the accountability on U.S. taxpayer dollars has been a top priority from President Biden to Secretary Blinken to Administrator Power. We are committed, committed, committed that every dollar of U.S. taxpayer money will be accountable to the people of Ukraine and to the funders, the taxpayers in America.
We are working on many levels of accountability with the Government of Ukraine, with President Zelenskyy and his great team, and they have been actively involved. We also have third-party accountability, so we have obviously our IG, our inspector generals at State and USAID and DOD who have been very active in overseeing this assistance, as well as NGOs who are looking at it as well as assistance projects that will really answer to the taxpayer, to us, to the State Department, and then to Congress about how this money is being used.
So we are focused on it, we are watching every dollar, and we are committed to the highest level of accountability.
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