President Donald Trump said on Monday that he wants Ukraine to trade “rare earths and other things” for continued American military and financial support.
The office of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky seems amenable to the idea, while the invading Russians do not like it at all.
“We’re telling Ukraine they have very valuable rare earths. We’re looking to do a deal with Ukraine, where they’re going to secure what we’re giving them with their rare earths and other things. We want a guarantee. We’re handing them money, hand over fist,” Trump said in one of his freewheeling Oval Office chats with reporters.
“I want to have security of rare earths. We’re putting in hundreds of billions of dollars. They have great rare earths. And I want security of the rare earths, and they’re willing to do it,” he said.
Trump said the Ukrainian government was willing to entertain his ideas for “equalization” of America’s “close to $300 billion” in support.
The Kyiv Independent reported on Monday that President Zelensky has indeed embraced the concept of sharing Ukraine’s resources with its allies as part of his “victory plan” for ending the war with Russia.
“But for this, security must be guaranteed so that the Russians do not occupy this Ukrainian land with minerals,” a source in Zelensky’s office added.
This, of course, is a detail that does not sit well with the Kremlin.
“If we call things by their name, this is essentially a proposal to buy assistance – shifting it from free aid to a commercial arrangement,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov grumbled on Tuesday.
“It would be better of course for the assistance to not be provided at all, as that would contribute to the end of this conflict,” he said.
Peskov’s response achieved stratospheric levels of hypocrisy on several fronts, since Russia not only started the war in 2022, but paid handsomely for assistance from the likes of Iran and North Korea when its offensive stalled out.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz also objected to Trump’s suggestion after meeting with European Union (EU) leaders in Brussels on Monday.
Scholz denounced Trump’s idea as “very selfish” and “very self-centered” because Ukraine would need its mineral wealth to rebuild after the war.
The term “rare earth” is casually employed to describe a range of scarce and valuable minerals, although it technically only applies to 17 elements that have become integral to advanced electronics and medicine. Some of these minerals turned out to be considerably less “rare” than geologists of the 18th and 19th Centuries suspected – one of them, cerium, is actually quite abundant – but the name stuck.
China produces the lion’s share of the world’s rare earths at the moment. The cost of refining the materials gives the industry a high barrier to entry. The first commercial-scale rare earth refinery in North America was opened by Canada last summer with funding from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), which wants American companies to become less dependent on China for their supply.
Ukraine does not have a terribly large supply of literal rare earth minerals, but it does offer an abundance of other “critical” mineral resources, including lithium, titanium, beryllium, and uranium. These are most likely the minerals Trump was referring to, and they are the resources named in Zelensky’s “victory plan” – which he drafted near the end of President Joe Biden’s term but seemingly with Donald Trump in mind.
“The deposits of critical resources in Ukraine, along with Ukraine’s globally important energy and food production potential, are among the key predatory objectives of the Russian Federation in this war. And this is our opportunity for growth,” Zelensky said when rolling out his peace proposal.
Ukraine has traditionally struggled to exploit its mineral resources and is not even precisely sure of how much mineral wealth it has. Zelensky was working on a plan to bring in foreign investors and mining companies when Russia invaded in 2022.
According to some estimates, Ukraine is sitting on up to $15 trillion worth of minerals – by far the largest deposits in Europe for some critical materials. Rapacious Russian President Vladimir Putin will be reluctant to hand such a prize over to the United States and European Union (EU), especially since some of Ukraine’s juiciest mineral deposits are tantalizingly close to the territory Russia is presently occupying.
A senior Ukrainian official told the Washington Post on Tuesday that Zelensky is “ready to sign documents about joint agreements” to develop mineral resources and believes “having a strategic U.S. interest in Ukraine is a key component to our security in the future.”
These comments point the way toward a mutually beneficial arrangement in which the U.S. helps Ukraine mine and refine its long-untapped resources in exchange for a cut of the output. It is not unreasonable for Zelensky to suppose that the U.S. would be more committed to Ukraine’s defense over the long term if America made billion-dollar investments in developing trillion-dollar mineral deposits.
