Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he plans to meet US President Donald Trump “as early as this Friday” to sign a bilateral commercial agreement to jointly develop and manage Ukraine’s mineral wealth.
Trump insisted on the deal three weeks after assuming office in return for the assistance the US has provided in the three years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, telling an interviewer, “I told [Ukraine] that I want the equivalent of, like, $500bn worth of rare earth, and they’ve essentially agreed to do that.”
Zelenskyy publicly rejected that figure, and he twice rejected any deal that did not contain security guarantees for Ukraine.
A text of the agreement published by Western media on Wednesday did not reveal any guarantees, and placed no upper limit on the value the United States would receive – though Trump told reporters “it could be a trillion-dollar deal.”
The leaked agreement says Ukraine and the US would establish a joint fund, and Ukraine would “contribute to the Fund 50 percent of all revenues earned from the future monetisation of all relevant Ukrainian Government-owned natural resource assets … defined as deposits of minerals, hydrocarbons, oil, natural gas, and other extractable materials.”
It also included the revenues generated by infrastructure such as fossil gas terminals and ports.
The revenues of this fund would be reinvested “to promote the safety, security and prosperity of Ukraine”, it said.
A joint report this week from the European Commission, World Bank, United Nations and Ukrainian government put the country’s reconstruction cost at well over half a trillion dollars.
The minerals agreement also did not address where that left European Union members, who have provided more than half the military and financial aid Ukraine has received, other than to say Ukraine and the US “will strive to avoid conflicts with Ukraine’s obligations under its accession to the European Union”.
French Defence Minister Sebastien Lecornu revealed that he has been in talks with Ukraine since October to secure access to rare minerals vital to the defence and electronics industries.
“Our defence industry will need a number of very key raw materials in our own weapons systems, not for next year, but for the next 30 or 40 years. We have to diversify that,” he said in a televised interview.
On the day the agreement was leaked, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk wrote on social media, “Uncertainty, unpredictability, deals. Are these really the rules that the new international order should be based on?”
Trump’s war of words with Europe
Trump has made no secret of his adversarial view of the EU. “The European Union was formed to screw the United States. That’s the purpose of it and they’ve done a very good job,” he told reporters at the start of his first cabinet meeting on February 26.
Tusk reacted by posting, “The EU wasn’t formed to screw anyone. Quite the opposite. It was formed to maintain peace, to build respect among our nations, to create free and fair trade.”
Trump’s departure from a common position with Europe on Ukraine had become apparent when he started direct talks with Russia on February 18 that didn’t include Ukraine or the EU. A second round of those talks was to take place in Istanbul on Thursday.
As the war hit its third anniversary on Monday, Trump moved further away, siding with Russia in a UN Security Council vote that avoided naming Russia the aggressor in the war, or demanding the return of Ukrainian lands Russia has seized.
EU members on the Security Council – including Britain, France, Greece, Slovenia and Denmark – abstained.
The US attempted to pass the same text in a UN General Assembly (UNGA) vote earlier in the day, but was rejected. The resolution the UNGA did pass also avoided naming Russia the aggressor in the war, but called for the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity, in accordance with the UN Charter.
In 2023, Ukraine had embarked on an effort to pass a UNGA resolution condemning Russia as an aggressor. Monday’s resolution, passed by 93 out of 193 countries, showed how far Ukraine is from garnering the two-thirds majority it seeks.
“The system once based on rules, agreements, and shared values has been under a tsunami of geopolitical and geo-economic challenges … Now, its whole existence is under question,” wrote Victoria Vdovychenko, a programme leader at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Geopolitics, in an article marking the war anniversary.
In a sign of Trump’s power, Europeans have tried to appease him despite the growing distance between them.
The day after the UN votes, French President Emmanuel Macron held a jovial press conference with Trump in the White House, where he offered cautious support for the minerals deal.
He also agreed that European countries “need to do more … to more fairly share the security burden that your country has been carrying for so many years”.
Pete Hegseth, Trump’s defence secretary, flatly stated on February 12 that “stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe,” and called on Europeans to spend 5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) on defence.
British Prime Mininster Keir Starmer became the second EU leader to oblige Trump by announcing a hike in defence spending ahead of a trip to Washington on Thursday. Defence spending in the UK would go from 2 to 2.5 percent of GDP by 2027, and 3 percent by 2029, he said.
Few US security guarantees for Ukraine
Hegseth told Europeans they would have to provide the “overwhelming share” of aid to Ukraine.
That was underlined this week, as Trump said he would not undertake the lion’s share of security guarantees.
Trump told reporters he wasn’t going to oblige.
“I’m not going to make security guarantees beyond very much,” he said on Wednesday. “We’re going to have Europe do that.”
That appeared to dampen the hopes Zelenskyy expressed after Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine, General Keith Kellogg, visited him in Kyiv on February 20. Zelenskyy said they had had a “good conversation” with “a lot of details” on security guarantees, among other things.
On Sunday Zelenskyy even offered Trump his resignation after Trump called him a dictator.
“If it’s about peace in Ukraine and you really want me to leave my position, I am ready to do that,” he told reporters. “Secondly, I can exchange it for NATO [membership] if there is such an opportunity.”
Earlier in the day, Russia had unleashed its largest air attack of the war against Ukrainian cities, involving 267 Shahed kamikaze drones and three ballistic missiles. Ukraine shot down or used electronic jamming to disorient all but seven of the drones.
