Bret Stephens - Can Samantha Power Win the Battle for Ukraine’s Future?
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By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
Sept. 13, 2023
Late on a muggy evening in mid-July, Samantha Power, administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, and Bridget Brink, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, boarded a night train from Kyiv to Odesa, accompanied by a few staff members and a discreet security detail. Earlier that day, Ukrainian naval drones had damaged the bridge connecting Russia to occupied Crimea, the second such attack of the war. Hours later, the Kremlin announced it would not renew the Black Sea Grain Initiative, a deal brokered last year by Turkey and the United Nations that, in a little less than a year, had allowed Ukraine to export nearly 33 million tons of grain from its three major remaining ports.
By the time the train pulled into Odesa the next morning, the city and surrounding areas had endured a night of ferocious Russian attacks: approximately 25 Iranian-made drones and several cruise missiles, according to a Ukrainian official. The attacks would keep coming, blowing off the roof of a cathedral, destroying a wholesale market, and — roughly 24 hours after Power’s own visit to it — damaging a stately Sea Port Administration building near the seafront.
The port itself was silent: no ships, no cargo, no people. Odesa is a principal lifeline not only for Ukraine’s heavily agricultural economy, but also for millions of people in some of world’s poorest countries. In Vladimir Putin’s effort to blockade Ukraine, he’s also pushing millions of vulnerable people toward hunger.
I joined Power on her trip through Ukraine as both a believer in and skeptic of the American development agency’s work. I have been a fervent advocate of arming and assisting Kyiv going back to Russia’s first invasion, when it annexed Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine in 2014. In May 2022 the government of Russia barred me for life; I took it as a badge of honor and framed the notice.
But I’ve also long had doubts about the efficacy of foreign aid, which can do as much to fund corruption and promote dependency as it can to advance good governance and economic development. Years ago, during the George W. Bush administration, I shadowed another U.S.A.I.D. administrator, Henrietta Fore, on a visit to Afghanistan. Despite some notable gains, especially in areas such as girls’ education, it was clear the agency was struggling.
Security concerns prevented many of its people from visiting the projects they were funding — one staff member I met had never left the American Embassy compound except to go to a nearby restaurant. Afghan governors and ministers knew how to grab their share of aid. Corruption was rampant among not only Afghans but also the U.S. contractors — the notorious “Beltway bandits” — who were supposed to build schools, roads and other critical pieces of infrastructure on Uncle Sam’s behalf.
In the end, approximately $145 billion in assistance — about $20 billion of which was administered by U.S.A.I.D. — went down the drain. Would the story turn out similarly in Ukraine, a state that last year ranked alongside Angola in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index? At least until the war, the heavy hand of oligarchs was felt in nearly every national institution, from the judiciary, Parliament and the presidency to military contracting, the media and virtually every major industry, and even in recent weeks the continued power of corruption has been apparent.
A lot depends on the fortunes of war. But two additional factors are crucial: The quality of our aid, as opposed to the mere quantity, and the readiness of Ukrainians to use it wisely and honestly. That’s what I went to Ukraine to see for myself.
At the Port Administration, Power spent several hours with Ukrainian cabinet ministers, local officials, business leaders, farmers and representatives of volunteer organizations — talking a bit, listening a lot, and scribbling everything down. “One of the things I’ve always believed in terms of anything you want to do in the world, you have to meet people where they are,” she told me later that afternoon over beers at an outdoor cafe. “That’s why I take so many notes. I want to understand who they are, what they need, how they prioritize.”
There are senior U.S. officials who prefer to leave details to subordinates. Power isn’t one of them. She peppered Ukrainian officials with precise questions about alternative routes for moving Ukrainian grain, mainly through smaller ports on the Danube. She drilled down on logistical costs, dredging requirements, and the expense of reloading grain from river barges to larger cargo ships in the Romanian port of Constanta. A little later, at a round table with farmers and agribusiness leaders, she got into the nitty-gritty of sunflower-oil exports, which have gone down significantly since the war began.
In my notes of the conversation, I wrote: “She brings star appeal to questions like the cost of fertilizer.”
Power, who is 52, is probably better known for her past work than for her current job: She was Barack Obama’s U.N. ambassador, a cabinet-level post, in his second term; she also won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for her book, “‘A Problem from Hell,’” which looked at why American policymakers so often failed to act against genocide. Less known is that she got her career start in the 1990s as a young freelance journalist covering the wars in the Balkans. There she witnessed the work of Fred Cuny, a larger-than-life humanitarian who made an indelible impression when he figured out how to sneak water-filtration systems into Sarajevo as the city was under siege by Serbian forces. (In 1995 Cuny disappeared in Chechnya, where he was probably murdered.)
“I was in awe of what Fred had done,” Power recalled in her memoir. “By improvising a water system, he had helped blunt the impact of one of the cruelest tactics in the Bosnian Serb siege. He had also enhanced his relevance in Washington.”
To be U.S.A.I.D. administrator may not be the most prominent post in Washington. But it is very much a job suited for a pragmatic idealist, particularly one with a “reporter’s heart” and a “MacGyver brain,” as she described herself in our conversations. “This idea of getting close — you always come back with something very different,” she said, pointing to the bustling street scene in Odesa.
The challenge is how to combine firsthand knowledge with workable solutions. After leaving the Port Administration building, Power held a news conference in which she pledged $250 million for upgraded transport infrastructure, new grain elevators, loading equipment and port refurbishment. At other stops on the trip she also pledged $500 million in new funding for emergency humanitarian assistance and $230 million in financing help for Ukrainian businesses.
This, in turn, was on top of close to $3 billion in American humanitarian assistance, $3 billion in development assistance, and $20.5 billion in direct-budget support. Other countries, mostly European but also Canada and Japan, have piled on billions more, not counting the roughly $44 billion in American military aid for Kyiv.
It’s a lot of money. But an additional lesson from the aid fiasco in Afghanistan is that pouring money into a country that lacks the mechanisms to absorb and distribute it responsibly and effectively is a recipe for failure. Will Ukraine prove any different?
The administration’s loudest critics think not. “Biden Is Sending Our Treasures to Corrupt Oligarchs,” was the title of a Tucker Carlson screed on Fox News in early April, shortly before his own oligarch sent him packing. Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican presidential candidate, has suggested that President Biden’s support for Ukraine is somehow connected to money his son got from the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma.
Such attacks, made in bad faith, are wildly overwrought. But they aren’t baseless. Last September, Ambassador Brink wrote a diplomatic cable warning the State Department of her concerns. “There are, for instance, severe limits on the number of American officials in the field and a number of security constraints on their movements,” Politico reported, summarizing Brink’s cable. “It’s also hard to find contractors willing to work in high-risk regions or set up in-person meetings with government officials, civil society leaders and others receiving the aid.” Both concerns echo the kinds of problems that plagued American aid efforts in Afghanistan.
A month after my visit to Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky fired all of his top regional military recruiters following revelations of extensive bribery schemes. Then he fired his defense minister “as financial improprieties in the ministry came to light,” according to The Times’s Andrew Kramer. Ihor Kolomoisky, the oligarch who helped launch Zelensky’s political career, was arrested on suspicions of fraud and money laundering. Another Times investigation, into the former lawmaker Serhiy Pashinsky, showed the ways in which Ukraine’s desperate need for weapons in the early days of the war led to apparent profiteering by a dubious middleman. And U.S.A.I.D. still relies on the Beltway bandits to deliver goods.
Then, too, the sheer scale of money flowing into Ukraine makes it difficult to monitor. In a telephone interview, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, told me that $20.5 billion of the nearly $71 billion in total U.S. aid has gone to “direct-budget support” — much of it in the form of salaries for teachers, police officers, firefighters and other civil servants — in a “mechanism via the World Bank where the World Bank basically gets the receipts.” Given the bank’s mixed record on preventing corruption, that’s not completely reassuring.
Some of this, of course, is good news — evidence that Zelensky is willing to take political risks to confront corruption as none of his predecessors dared. It also suggests that the U.S. government is at least trying to learn from past mistakes. “We need to do a better job of impact analysis, randomized control trials, cash benchmarking,” Power acknowledged. “We are trying to systematize rigor around which programs are working and which are not.” The agency is doing more with local NGOs and independent media organizations to improve governance and accountability.
“It’s not a coincidence,” she noted, “that virtually all of the news stories that have come to light — the firings, the prosecutions that have been done since the full-scale invasion — have been brought to light by whistleblowers, by civil-society anti-corruption watchdogs that we have funded, by independent media that aren’t just doing ‘rally round the flag’ but believe it is their role to uncover wrongdoing.”
There is a deeper insight implicit in Power’s remark, which is that aid agencies like U.S.A.I.D. are more likely to achieve results by doing little things well, rather than by trying big things, and failing; by being (to adopt a thought from the development economist William Easterly) “searchers” for local solutions to local problems, rather than “planners” who try to impose solutions conceived from afar. But there’s also a recognition that aid will work only if Ukrainians do the deeper work of reforming their own institutional and ethical culture.
Three things suggest it’s finally happening: A generational shift, the exigencies of war, and a kind of unspoken belief, to borrow a line, that “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”
Take Anna Bondarenko, who at 27 is the founder of the nonprofit Ukrainian Volunteer Service. As a teenager, she was inspired by examples of volunteerism during a State Department-funded exchange program in Jamestown, Calif.
“Before the invasion we had 10,000 volunteers. Now it is 200,000,” she explained when I met her in Odesa. Her organization has people ranging in age from 14 to 82 and a budget of $700,000, some of which comes from U.S.A.I.D. The volunteers do everything from working in national parks, to helping the country’s more than five million internally displaced persons, to teaching the value of volunteer work to high school students.
Or take Svitlana Mironchuk, 32, a creative-agency executive. Twenty years ago, she reminded me, independent journalists risked (and sometimes lost) their lives to report on corruption in government. Now it’s the government that puts itself at existential risk if it fails to tackle corruption.
“For us it’s a matter of life and death while in the Western countries it is rather a matter of justice and law,” she said. Every embezzled hryvnia (the national currency), she added, “means fewer drones, guns, cars for the defenders.”
Mironchuk also stresses the youth angle: Change, she believes, is happening because “the first independent generation,” which did not grow up under Soviet rule, is finally taking the reins. Zelensky was just 12 years old when the Soviet Union collapsed, and many of the parliamentary members of his Servant of the People party were elected when they were in their 30s or late 20s. They have finally moved on from the Homo sovieticus mentality that continues to trap Russia.
Then there is Mykhailo Fedorov, the country’s 32-year-old minister of digital transformation. I listened to Federov deliver a presentation to Power in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv where, in the first weeks of the invasion, 400 were found dead after a Russian massacre of civilians. Reminders of war were still visible everywhere we went in the town. But in the stylish shared work space of an apartment complex where the pockmarks of patched-up bullet holes could still be seen just behind a courtyard playground, I was offered a glimpse of Ukraine’s transformation.
It’s a mobile app and web portal called Diia, a Ukrainian acronym for Derzhava i Ya, or “State and Me.” Unveiled four years ago, and funded by U.S.A.I.D. to the tune of $25 million, it allows its users to obtain roughly 120 government services — including driver’s licenses, passports, company registrations, property-damage reports, construction permits — all with a few taps on a smartphone. More than half of Ukraine’s people already use it. At a stroke, it eliminates mountains of paperwork and the thousands of civil-service jobs needed to administer it. It also radically diminishes the opportunities for bribetaking that so often come when a petty bureaucrat stands between a needy citizen and an official permit.
Fedorov calls Diia “one of the most complex services to implement and one of the easiest to use.” Since the start of the war, Ukrainians have filed 509,000 reports on damaged property, which is almost certainly an undercount: The United Nations Development Program estimated in June that 1.5 million homes in Ukraine have been destroyed since the start of the full-scale invasion, with damage totaling $135 billion.
The scale is staggering. But in efforts like these, Ukrainians are also showing that they don’t merely intend to survive the war. If the anti-corruption movement gains the upper hand, their country will emerge from it transformed.
Power sees the story of Ukraine’s struggles as part of a global test for American values.
“This is a time in which the contest between an autocratic and kleptocratic model, and a democratic and accountable and more inclusive model, is playing out all around the world,” she told me. “We are in the 17th straight year of freedom in decline around the world. There are real questions about democratic backsliding and which model is going to prevail.”
The challenge is global. Russia offers mercenary services to nervous dictators in countries like Syria in exchange for basing rights or natural resources. The Chinese offer soft loans to cash-strapped countries in exchange for strategic concessions (as they have in Sri Lanka with 99-year lease for a port). Unlike the Americans, neither the Chinese nor Russians will lecture their client governments about democracy, L.G.B.T.Q. rights or the need to stop corruption.
Power wants to make the case that the American way remains a better option, not just for the countries that stand to benefit from it but for our national interests, too.
One advantage for the United States is that, wherever the Chinese go, they have a way of wearing out their welcome. The Times has chronicled multiple stories of Beijing borrower’s remorse, from Ecuador, which is sinking under the weight of debts to Beijing for a dam that started cracking almost the moment it was finished, to the Solomon Islands, where the Chinese arrived with promises to build a stadium but quickly started behaving like an abusive colonial power. The point of Chinese development, epitomized by Xi Jinping’s “Belt and Road Initiative,” is to build dependence, not independence; to entrap, not develop.
The second advantage for the United States builds off the first. There is a common view that development works best when democracy and other mechanisms of consultation, transparency and accountability don’t stand in the way. That may be true in the early stages of development, but China’s recent stumbles — it has lent $900 billion to 151 countries, much of which may never be repaid — should call the broader argument into question.
Ukraine shows that real development happens when people believe they have an ownership stake in their own societies. Power described development as a three-legged stool of security, economic growth and democracy/human rights: “If any of the legs is shorter than the other it doesn’t mean good things can’t happen. But it’s a much more fragile and unstable enterprise.”
The reason Ukrainians have surprised and inspired so much of the world — themselves not least — since Russia’s invasion isn’t simply that they have fought. It’s that they have things worth fighting for: civil rights and an elected government; a news media that holds leaders to account; a culture of innovation and enterprise; a spirit of kinship, compassion and obligation for fellow citizens caught in the maw of war.
All of this vindicates decisions by successive U.S. administrations to “do” development the hard way: by pushing reforms and supporting democratic institutions while keeping the door open to eventual Ukrainian membership in NATO and the European Union. The result is a country that, provided it wins the war, will be a long-term partner of the United States not because its leaders choose it for transactional reasons, but because the values and sympathies of its people demand it.
There’s a final potential American advantage over China, though it’s one that U.S. politicians often seem afraid to mention. “A very large reason why we do development work is, in fact, compassion,” Power argued. “Recognizing this generosity, the fact that we invest for its own sake, distinguishes us from other powerful actors on the world stage.”
In knowing we’re the kind of country that supplies generators for people without heat, or water trucks to people without water, or weapons for people without means of self-defense, we help remind ourselves that, for all that ails us, we remain a force for good in the world. That’s a check on the corrosive self-hatred that threatens our sense of purpose as a great nation.
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Power’s trip came in the early days of Ukraine’s counteroffensive, when hopes still ran high that the war could end this year in a smashing triumph for Kyiv. Although some military strategists remain optimistic, it now looks as if the conflict could be a long and indecisive slog.
Until the war ends, U.S.A.I.D., its foreign partners, and other agencies of Western largess will remain the life-support system for Ukraine, without which it could not function. But eventually the war will end.
What happens to Ukraine then? Will it end up as a long-term ward of the international community, like Bosnia after the Dayton Accords? Will it revert to the oligarchical model that typified its early years? Or will it make good on its promise of genuine modernity? That process does not necessarily hinge on the recapture of Crimea or Donbas. But it does require a renovated ethical culture to undergird a strong rule of law and a political class bound by a sense of public duty and personal accountability.
Even if Ukraine wins the war soon and maintains its reformist course, it will take years of effort and hundreds of billions in additional financial support before it pulls itself out of the rubble. It will also require levels of political will and bureaucratic focus that Americans, historically, have found hard to sustain from one crisis and administration to the next.
If Ukraine can survive a Russian invasion and flourish afterward, it will be a rebuke to the idea that the free world is in terminal decline, that alliances with the United States are a bad bet, and that other nations facing similar threats — Taiwan in particular — should simply accommodate themselves to their aggressive neighbors rather than defend their freedom and independence.
But if Ukraine falters, either in war and peace, we will face a world in which, as Thucydides put it long ago, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
Bret Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. Facebook
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