The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Think tank: Delays in aid hamper Kyiv
More civilians are killed while U.S. aid is stalled by Republicans in Congress.
KYIV, UKRAINE — More civilians died across Ukraine Sunday as analysts warned that delays in U.S. military assistance would see Kyiv struggle to fight off Russian offensives.
One man was killed Sunday after a Russian drone hit the truck he was driving in the Sumy region, the local prosecutor’s office said. Elsewhere, a 67-yearold woman was killed after shelling hit an apartment block in the Donetsk region, said Gov. Vadym Filashkin.
Officials in the Kharkiv region also said Sunday that they had retrieved the bodies of a 61-year-old woman and a 68-year-old man killed by a Russian strike the previous day. Ten Russian Shahed-type drones were shot down over the Kharkiv region overnight, the Ukrainian Air Force said Sunday.
Meanwhile, shelling in the Russian-occupied Kherson region killed two civilians Sunday, said Moscow-installed leader Vladimir Saldo. Ukrainian drones were also reported in Russia’s Krasnodar and Belgorod regions and over the Black Sea, the Russian Defense Ministry said.
The news came as the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, warned that delays in Western military assistance would increasingly hamper Ukraine’s ability to push back Russian advances.
With the war in Ukraine entering its third year and a vital U.S. aid package for Kyiv stalled in Congress by Republicans’ resistance, Russia has used its edge in firepower and personnel to step up attacks across eastern Ukraine.
It has increasingly used satellite-guided gliding bombs — dropped from planes from a safe distance — to pummel Ukrainian forces beset by a shortage of troops and ammunition.
In its report, the ISW said that Russian forces were prioritizing grinding, tactical gains with operational-level efforts focusing on the cities of Lyman, Chasiv Yar and Pokrovsk.
“The Russian military command likely assesses that Ukrainian forces will be unable to defend against current and future Russian offensive operations due to delays in or the permanent end of U.S. military assistance,” the think tank said.
Ukraine’s military chief, Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, said Saturday that Ukraine’s battlefield situation in the industrial east had “significantly worsened in recent days,” as warming weather allowed Russian forces to launch a fresh push along several stretches of the more than 620-mile-long front line.
THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION
It’s not a niche issue: More than half the American workforce are parents, and 34% of working parents in Georgia have young children.
That means that upward of 1.8 million people in the state each day confront the often-competing demands of workplace and child care, the need to earn a living and the need to find — or provide — safe supervision for their kids.
“As employers endeavor to attract and retain a robust workforce, understanding potential barriers such as the cost of child care becomes increasingly important,” wrote Brittany Birken, director and principal adviser in Community and Economic Development, and Herman Knopf, a visiting scholar in Community and Economic Development.
Some people bring children to relatives or relatively cheaper — and unlicensed — neighborhood outfits. While data is available only for the “above ground” operations, child care is a “significant financial commitment … particularly for families at the lower end of the income spectrum,” according to a paper released last week by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
The Atlanta Fed focused on Florida, which has nearly the same share of workers with young children as Georgia.
For households of two adults taking home the state’s median income, child care for one young child on average snared 11% of their pay. Add an infant, and the household would be paying 22%, the Fed found.
According to the Census Bureau, the median household income in Florida is $65,370, compared with Georgia’s median of $67,730. The median income nationally is $74,580.
At the low end, if the two adults are making Florida’s $12-an-hour minimum wage, they would average 16% of their income going to child care for one child and 38% if they add an infant, the Fed found.
Health issues often dog parents: If a child is sick, do the parents try to sneak them into their child care center, scramble for an alternative, or do they lose a day of work? The day care centers, too, face a dilemma if they are being paid by a child’s attendance each day: Do they take a sick child and risk infection to others?
The pandemic-triggered increase in remote work — and the flexibility it provided — has been crucial to getting more women into the workforce and keeping them working, according to a related paper from the Brookings Institution.
About one-quarter of “prime-age” women — 25 to 54 — with children were doing at least part of the work week at home last year, wrote Lauren Bauer, a fellow in economic studies, and Sarah Yu Wang, a research intern.
Well-educated women were nearly twice as likely to work at home, perhaps because they were also more likely to be in white-collar jobs.
The United States is the only developed country in the world without a universal paid maternity leave policy, they write.