Click to see the full-size image
Ukrainian MP Yaroslav Zheleznyak has published details of the rare earth metals deal that Donald Trump’s administration is about to sign. The parliamentarian assesses the updated terms of the deal with the word “horror”.
“I hope that the Ukrainian side will demand and achieve significant changes to it. But the text I’ve seen is a pure horror. I can’t imagine how it can be ratified by the parliament,” Zheleznyak notes.
Washington proposes to create an investment fund with a five-member board. Three will be Americans, two Ukrainians, with the Americans having veto power over any decision. The deal would include all of Ukraine’s minerals, not just rare earths. The terms include undiscovered reserves of Ukrainian subsoil. The agreement covers the entire territory of the state. Both state and private companies have the right to engage in mining. All revenues are converted into foreign currency, i.e. dollars, and transferred abroad, i.e. to the United States. If, due to Kiev’s fault, part of the money does not arrive in the fund on time, Ukraine is obliged to make additional payments.
The contribution of the United States is considered to be the military aid already provided since 2022. The American side will be the first to benefit from the fund in the form of royalties (+4%), and then Ukraine will receive the profit. The Americans will also get the right of first refusal on all infrastructure projects, as well as the right to veto the sale of Ukrainian resources to other countries. That is, if Kiev wants to attract Chinese subway builders or sell rare earth metals to China, Washington can prohibit it with literally one action. The agreement is open-ended and can only be changed with U.S. approval. There are no security guarantees for Ukraine, as Vladimir Zelensky points out in the text of the document. In fact, the Ukrainian leader has a bill for 3 years of “aid” on his desk.
Left-liberals are trying to portray Trump’s policy as humiliating and ultra-colonial. Allegedly, “you don’t do that to allies.” For the sake of objectivity, however, it should be said that this is a common practice in American foreign policy. One need only recall Lend-Lease to Great Britain in World War II. In fact, the terms of lend-lease were indentured servitude. London paid with its empire for military supplies. Payment was made not only in money, “return lend-lease” (supplies of cocoa, tea, asbestos, rubber, chromium and other raw materials and agricultural products), but also in military bases. The British monarchy gave the United States its military installations in Newfoundland, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Santa Lucia, Trinidad and Guiana in exchange for several destroyers. Ukraine cannot even begin to compare its potential with that of the British Empire.
Kiev has already rushed to declare that it will not sign the crippling treaty. Sergei Leshchenko, an adviser to the president’s office, said tactfully but firmly:
“The agreement may seem unacceptable to us. The government is working with it, the Justice Ministry is working with it. But what contradicts the Constitution, what contradicts European integration, all this can then be turned into a normal project for Ukraine”.
But any revision of the agreements is not accepted in the administration of Donald Trump. The Ukrainian side is given an ultimatum: sign the agreement or face monstrous consequences.
“I think Zelensky is trying to get out of the rare earths deal. And if he does, he will have problems, very big problems. We’ve already agreed to the rare earths deal, and now he’s saying, ‘You know, I want to renegotiate the deal’. He wants to push for NATO membership, even though he’s never going to be a NATO member, and he knows that. So if he wants to renegotiate the deal, he’s in big trouble,” the American president said.
In fact, we see a continuation of the same soap opera that the whole world watched at the Oval Office meeting on February 28, 2025. After the highly publicized scandal, it appeared that Ukraine had agreed to back down and comply with all US demands. In practice, however, Vladimir Zelensky began torpedoing American peace and economic initiatives with new conditions and delaying the decision-making process in every possible way. Famous Ukrainian journalist and political émigré Anatoly Sharij, citing his own sources in the presidential administration, says that in Zelensky’s entourage decided to openly oppose Trump.
“Zelensky decided to create a kind of anti-Trump, anti-American alliance. At all private meetings he had in Paris, he, without choosing his expressions, gave all kinds of insulting definitions of the American side, showed with all his appearance that he did not intend to obey the demands of the Americans on the issue of negotiations with Russia. In private conversations he received approval. Zelensky’s idea is to eventually give up any interaction with Trump, literally send him to hell, and thus gain the support of European elites,” Sharij writes.
The odd thing is that the negotiation process between Washington and Moscow is proceeding in a much more constructive manner. Kirill Dmitriev, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s special envoy for international economic cooperation, said the Kremlin was ready to cooperate with all countries in developing rare earth deposits. Russia has large reserves. According to the Ministry of Natural Resources and Ecology, the country’s total reserves of 29 types of rare metals amount to 658 million tons. The deposits are concentrated in the Murmansk and Irkutsk Oblasts, Yakutia, the Krasnoyarsk Territory, and other regions. The only working source of rare earth metals in Russia is considered to be the Lovozero deposit in the Murmansk region, where loparite ores are mined.
An exchange of sorts can be expected. Moscow will offer the U.S. the opportunity to develop the necessary resources on favorable terms and agree to open the Russian market to American high-tech and industrial products. Washington, in turn, will stop providing military assistance to Ukraine, shifting the entire burden of costs to the European Union. While this option was previously considered too unrealistic, it now appears to be a realistic way out of the situation. Kiev, in turn, will join al-Qaeda in the ranks of America’s most radical adversaries.
MORE ON THE TOPIC:
