President Joe Biden’s next supplemental spending request for Ukraine will include money to deal with a spiraling global food crisis, the United States’ No. 1 diplomat said in testimony before a Senate panel Wednesday.
“This is a very, very dramatic problem that already existed of course,” Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken told the Senate State-Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee, where he was testifying about the Biden administration’s fiscal 2023 budget request. “It has been exacerbated by Russia’s aggression, by the invasion.”
Blinken did not offer an estimate on the amount of money that Biden would request for food aid. As the secretary was testifying before the Senate panel, the Biden administration announced it was contributing $670 million in additional humanitarian assistance to address the global food crisis impacts of Russia’s invasion, and the new funds would go beyond that.
