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| U.S.-Ukrainian Mineral Deal Getting Close To Fruition |
| 2025-02-23 |
| [TWZ] Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky will soon sign a minerals agreement with the United States potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars, White House national security adviser Mike Waltz said Friday. That move is part of U.S. President Donald Trump’s effort to end the war with Russia and a deal the American leader says will recoup billions in military aid provided to Kyiv. “Here’s the bottom line: President Zelensky is going to sign that deal, and you will see that in the very short term,” Waltz said during remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), according to The Guardian. During his evening address on Friday, Zelensky hinted that a deal could be close. “Today, teams from Ukraine and the U.S. are working on a draft agreement between our governments,” he said. “This is an agreement that can strengthen our relations, and the key is to work out the details to ensure its effectiveness. I look forward to the outcome – a just result.” An agreement could be signed as soon as Saturday, “although it is not yet complete, people briefed on the talks said,” The Wall Street Journal reported. The exact terms could not be learned. Asked if this would go through, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Friday: “I think they want it. They feel good about it.” U.S. and Ukrainian officials negotiated all night into Friday morning to ink an agreement and end the souring Zelesnky-Trump relations, Axios reported, citing a U.S. official and a source with direct knowledge of the issue. The pending deal would give the U.S. access to Ukraine’s deposits of critical minerals including aluminum, gallium and titanium, Waltz said. As we previously reported, Ukraine possesses materials that are essential components of microchips and electric vehicle batteries and have significant military value. Trump has been touting this as a way to reduce the burden for supporting Ukraine, with Waltz claiming US aid to Kyiv has exceeded $175 billion, The Guardian reported. That figure, as we have explained before, contradicts information compiled by the Kiel Institute For The World Economy’s Ukraine Support Tracker, which shows that the U.S. has provided Ukraine with a little less than $120 billion from the U.S. More than half – $66.5 billion – was for direct security assistance in the form of donated weapons, according to Pentagon figures. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he was “very upset” with Zelensky over the deal, claiming the Ukrainian leader misrepresented the outcome of a meeting he had with Rubio and Vice President J.D. Vance. Zelensky said he wanted to make the deal but needed the approval of his legislature, Rubio said. However, “I read two days later that Zelensky is out there saying ‘I rejected the deal. I told him, No way that we’re not doing that.’ Well, that’s not what happened in that meeting,” Rubio explained. “So you start to get upset by something. We’re trying to help these guys.” As we previously noted, it’s one thing to strike a deal, but something else entirely to extract and process the resources. A little more than half of Ukraine’s mineral resources are contained in the four regions Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed in September 2022, and of which his army occupies a considerable swathe, The Independent reported earlier this month. That includes Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, though Kherson holds little value in terms of minerals, the publication added. The Crimean peninsula, annexed and occupied by Russian forces in 2014, also holds billions in mineral wealth, The Independent added. |
| Posted by:Skidmark |