Macron called Biden’s decision to free Ukraine’s hand with US missiles “good.” But German’Scholz said it would not follow suit.
Category: Full Text Articles – Audio Posts
Category Added in a WPeMatico Campaign
After a challenging year that almost forced it to close entirely, Reaching-Out Community Services reopened its food pantry at a new location in Bensonhurst last week.
Earlier this year, the organization — which has been providing food assistance and other programs to low-income Brooklynites for three decades — announced it was struggling. Demand for its services had skyrocketed, but so had operating costs and rent at the program’s old facility on New Utrecht Avenue, and financial support was dwindling.
In August, RCS’ founder and executive director said on Instagram that the org had been forced to reduce its staff and “cut off” thousands of families who had been receiving help. He reached out to local elected officials for support, according to News12, but by mid-September, the org had vacated its old headquarters, and things were looking dire. Neve put out a call for donations online, saying RCS was looking for a new home, but would need funds to support the move, “since we have drained out our budget.”
That support came together just in time, and RCS unveiled its new facility on 18th Avenue on Nov. 13 – just in time for the holidays.
“The 30-year-old program, once again, is continuing its mission, regardless of some challenges that we had to endure,” Neve told Brooklyn Paper. “The reason why we moved here is so we could help the community members. Thousands of people are going through hard times with food insecurity, and that’s the purpose of this mission, to help those who are suffering with food insecurity, and they need a helping hand.”
Neve thanked Council Member Susan Zhuang, Assembly Member William Colton, and U.S. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, and local orgs including the Rotary Club of Verrazano and the Ben-Bay Kiwanis Club for their support.
“RCS does such good work for people who are struggling to feed themselves and their families,” Zhuang said in a statement. “They are literally a lifeline for people in the community struggling with food insecurity. That is why I was proud to allocate funding for their vital food pantry program. Low-income residents deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, no matter their financial circumstances.”
The organization’s “innovative” program eases the burden and stigma of going to a food pantry, Zhuang said. Per RCS’ website, its “Digital Client Choice Food Pantry System” is “one-of-a-kind.”
Clients select their items, including fresh produce, on a bilingual touch screen computer — unlike at other pantries, where visitors might pick up pre-made bags of food. RCS workers receive the orders, find each item within the facility, and bring them to the client.
On opening day, the new facility was fully stocked and had plenty of visitors. RCS mostly serves locals in South Brooklyn and asks prospective clients to provide proof of address and some explanation of their financial situation.
Neve said he appreciated the support from the community and local orgs who came together to support RCS and southern Brooklynites in need of food assistance.
“It’s so needed, especially at this time, more than ever before,” he said. “Hopefully, we can see the good … we can keep that good going, and we’ll hopefully be successful in the mission we are trying to accomplish here.”
More than a million people in New York City are struggling with food insecurity, according to CityHarvest, and one in four children don’t know where their next meal is coming from. Food pantry visits in the city up 80% compared to 2019, as families grapple with higher grocery prices and general cost of living increases.
In Community District 11, which includes Bensonhurst, the median household income is around $60,000, according to the city’s Equitable Development Data Explorer. That’s considered “low-income” in New York City, and 25% of households in the district earn less than 30% of the Area Median Income — or $41,940 for a family of three — and are considered “very low-income.”
With Thanksgiving on the horizon, RCS is preparing for its annual Thanksgiving giveaway, but it needs donations to make the event successful.
“Hopefully, we can see the food that’s going to go, we can keep that good going, and we’ll hopefully be successful in the mission we are trying to accomplish here,” reads a post on RCS’ website. “We can continue to help as we did last year, but not without support from our caring friends. So please, let’s give thanks for what we have and just share a little back for those who are not so fortunate. Support and help feed a family or two for this Thanksgiving.”
Additional reporting by Arthur de Gaeta
As the COP29 climate summit enters the final stretch in Azerbaijan, there are growing frustrations over the apparent lack of progress toward securing a deal on climate finance – seen as a crucial step in reducing emissions and limiting global warming. Henry Ridgwell reports.
The Biden administration is making a final push during its last weeks in office to put Ukraine in the “strongest possible position” in preparation for negotiations. Their latest move, according to press reports and confirmed privately by administration sources (though not yet confirmed by U.S. announcements), is to authorize Ukraine to use its U.S.-supplied Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) to hit targets inside Russia in defense of Ukrainian forces fighting in Russia’s Kursk Province. The United States previously limited the weapons to be used only against Russian forces and installations inside Ukraine, such as in Crimea. The Ukrainians now may have mounted strikes inside Russia today using ATACMS, amid angry complaints from Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
The shift is a good move and may lead the French and British to lift some comparable restrictions on their own long-range weapons. But it’s late in coming, like other Biden administration decisions to supply advanced weapons systems to Ukraine. And the Biden administration won’t be around long enough to manage any end game to the war. The incoming Trump administration is apparently pushing fast-track negotiations to end this phase of the conflict on terms that risk favoring Russian President Vladimir Putin. All the outgoing Biden team can do at this point is push weapons out the door and ramp up economic pressure on Russia (they do have good options for the latter) and hope for the best.
The Biden administration did a lot to support Ukraine’s defense, rallying European and other nations to do the same. I don’t share the cynical view that the Biden team was stingy with assistance to stymie Ukrainian victory. But the administration’s decisions were often slow, made at a deliberate pace not always commensurate with need. Mixed messages about lifting ATACMS restrictions created the impression of hesitation, even dithering. Similar cycles of hesitation and long deliberation accompanied earlier decisions about sending Ukraine F-16s, certain armored vehicles, High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) missiles, and other weapons systems.
According to administration sources, the reason the restriction on use of ATACMS was finally lifted was the appearance of North Korean forces in Russia, apparently making preparations to join Russian troops against Ukraine in Russia’s Kursk region; that gave administration proponents of lifting the restrictions an argument that it was Putin who had escalated the conflict by bringing in those forces and that lifting the ATACMS restrictions was only a response.
Failure to Press Advantages
An internal administration dynamic that lifting restrictions on Ukraine’s use of weapons required some rationale other than helping Ukraine defend itself speaks to a lack of determination to push potential advantages and an overthinking about “escalation.” Administration officials make the case that no one weapons system would change the course of the war. That may be true, but the cumulative impact of many slow decisions about weapons systems might have had impact at the margins, and it is at the margins that some wars are decided. Indeed, Putin sought to escalate at least rhetorically again today by announcing the formal signing of a revised nuclear doctrine that already had been announced in September.
President-elect Donald Trump’s team is setting the stage for rapid moves on Ukraine, apparently planning a big push to end the conflict. That may include a ceasefire along current lines, and some sort of security support for Ukraine. That is not necessarily a radical approach. The Biden team had privately acknowledged that Ukraine might not regain all its territory for some time and that, in the interim, a ceasefire might be needed, supported by serious security guarantees. The Biden version of security guarantees for Ukraine has started out with a set of parallel, bilateral memoranda of understandings between Ukraine and NATO and other nations, including the United States. However, again privately, some in the Biden administration acknowledged that this was inadequate and, with reluctance, recognized that Ukrainian membership in NATO, with only “free” or “unoccupied” Ukraine covered by the alliance, could be the most viable way to end the war. Senior European officials at NATO privately say that they have come to that conclusion as well.
The Risk of a Phased Conquest
But rather than striving for Ukraine’s NATO membership, which is currently the stated NATO-accepted goal, the Trump plan seems to involve some sort of forced neutrality for Ukraine or a moratorium (perhaps for 20 years) on any moves toward Ukraine’s NATO membership. This reported sketch of a Trump plan raises one fatal problem up front: without serious security support for Ukraine, this could set the stage for a phased Russian conquest of the entire country — first, Western acquiescence to Russian conquests up to the ceasefire line, and second, a signal that there would not be much response to another, subsequent Russian invasion of Ukraine, probably after an interval for Russia to refit its forces. For decades, analysts have used (and sometimes misapplied) the lesson of the 1938 Peace Conference in Munich in which the British and French acquiesced to German occupation of a portion of Czechoslovakia in exchange for Hitler’s promises of subsequent peace. Within months of that ill-conceived concession, Germany occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia and Hitler started planning the invasion of Poland, assuming that Britain and France would never stand up to him.
A Trump “peace plan” that essentially abandons Ukraine would mirror the bad deal at Munich, which has served for generations as an example of Western fecklessness in the face of a dictator’s will. Like the Munich deal, it could encourage Putin or other aggressive leaders to launch new wars, perhaps in Asia against Taiwan.
Some in Trump World appear to be well aware of the dangers of a bad deal on Ukraine. They privately acknowledge that the Trump administration might own the terrible images of Ukraine falling to a subsequent Russian attack made possible by a bad deal, a sort of giant version of the images of Kabul falling to the Taliban in 2021 with millions of refugees, a new wave of atrocities, and indications of U.S. weakness.
During the presidential campaign, Senator J.D. Vance, now Trump’s vice president-elect, offered a plan that would include freezing the conflict on the current ceasefire line but also heavily fortifying that line to prevent further Russian aggression. Vance did not specify what that meant, but his formula opens the door to continued U.S. military assistance to Ukraine and, potentially, foreign forces on Ukrainian soil to back up a ceasefire. The possibility of European and other countries’ forces on the ground in Ukraine to support a ceasefire is a longshot but not fanciful: at the Berlin Koerber Conference on Nov. 12, where I was present, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock raised such a possibility. Potential contributor nations would likely demand, understandably, contingency U.S. air, intelligence, and logistic support.
In short, a Trump administration push for a rapid settlement in Ukraine need not be worst case if — but only if — it includes serious security provisions for Ukraine. NATO membership would provide the best security for Ukraine and for Europe, and any gap between NATO’s security provisions and what Ukraine gets would be temptation for Putin to exploit. But a Trump plan for Ukraine that includes something stronger than the Biden administration’s bundle of bilateral MOUs could hold some promise.
Putin, however, gets a vote. So far, Kremlin-tied Russians have treated early signals of the Trump plan for Ukraine with scorn, demanding Ukraine’s surrender. Should the Kremlin maintain a maximalist line, the Trump team will have to decide whether to cave to it or push back, the latter possibly by increasing support for Ukraine and pressure on Russia.
After many months of stasis, events in Ukraine could move quickly. The Biden team will do what it can as it prepares to leave; the Trump team will have challenges putting its ambitions to end the war to the test. All the while, the stakes will be high.
IMAGE: Pro-Ukrainian activists demonstrate in front of the White House in Washington, DC, on November 17, 2024. US President Joe Biden has cleared Kyiv to use long-range American missiles against military targets inside Russia, a US official told AFP on Sunday, hours after Russia targeted Ukraine’s power grid in a deadly barrage. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has long pushed for authorization from Washington to use the powerful Army Tactical Missile System, known by its initials ATACMS, to hit targets inside Russia. (Photo by DANIEL SLIM/AFP via Getty Images)
The post Biden’s Final Efforts on Ukraine — and Trump’s First Moves appeared first on Just Security.
