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Ukraine is getting an additional $1.7 billion in assistance from the U.S. government and the World Bank to pay the salaries of its beleaguered health care workers and provide other essential services. The money coming Tuesday from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Treasury Department and the World Bank is meant to alleviate the acute budget deficit caused by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “brutal war of aggression,” USAID said in a statement. (Hussein, 7/12)

As a trauma specialist and orthopedic surgeon in the western Ukraine city of Uzhhorod, Dr. Andriy Buchok has grown used to the frequent 24-hour shifts that make him feel like he lives in the hospital where he works and to routinely skipping his supposed days off. Harder than that is lacking the medical equipment required to treat some war injuries, which at times represents the difference between a patient keeping a limb and having it amputated. (Ortiz, 7/12)

U.S. food aid is taking months to reach needy nations despite an urgent global food crisis, a bipartisan group of senators said Tuesday, urging the Biden administration to accelerate delivery as the war in Ukraine pushes more countries closer to famine. In a letter to U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator Samantha Power, one Democrat and 12 Republican lawmakers said that inadequate stewardship of funding and staffing shortages jeopardized the effectiveness of U.S. efforts against mounting global hunger. (Ryan, 7/12)

The meeting between the two men came a month after Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador boycotted President Joe Biden’s Western Hemisphere summit, and was intended to reflect something of a detente amid rising concerns over migration, trade and the flow of fentanyl across the southwest U.S. border. (Sheridan and Parker, 7/12)

Researchers have been studying vaccine hesitancy in Guatemala, interviewing people to understand their resistance to COVID-19 vaccines and to find solutions. ... Guatemala has one of the lowest COVID-19 vaccination rates in Latin America: only about 35% of people have been fully vaccinated (see ‘Vaccine progress’). The health ministry has recorded more than 900,000 SARS-CoV-2 infections and 18,500 deaths since the pandemic began. But this is probably an underestimate, because of a lack of testing, says Óscar Chávez, co-founder of the data-analysis think tank Laboratorio de Datos, based in Guatemala City. And that number will undoubtedly rise, he adds, because the vaccination rate is slowing. (7/7)