Washington and Kyiv indicated this week that they’ve reached a deal on giving the United States a stake in Ukraine’s mineral wealth. It is expected that Presidents Trump and Zelensky might formalise the agreement as early as Friday.
While Trump has framed the agreement as compensation for US aid to Ukraine over the course of its war with Russia, Zelensky initially pitched the deal as a sweetener for continued American commitment to Ukraine. Indeed, the draft of the agreement includes a clause, insisted on by Kyiv, that the US “supports Ukraine’s effort to obtain security guarantees needed to establish lasting peace,” but includes no specific security guarantees from Washington.
While Trump sounds like he’s trying to strip Ukraine for parts, Zelensky seems to think he’s getting a future US commitment to Ukraine’s security. So who’s playing whom?
The Ukraine deal shows the problem with Trump’s tendency to view the United States’ international role in mercenary terms. While Washington hasn’t committed to anything yet, it’s possible that the US stake in Ukraine’s natural resources could serve as a backdoor for US security guarantees to Ukraine in the future.
This would be a very bad deal for the United States, perpetuating its entanglement in Ukraine amid simmering tensions with Russia while obstructing burden-shifting to Europe. In exchange, Washington is unlikely to even gain much in revenue, let alone in strategic significance, given the evidence that Ukraine’s supposed mineral wealth and rare earth reserves, hyped up by Kyiv for Trump’s benefit, are in fact vastly overstated.
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