Breaking news update: Negotiations between the United States and Ukraine broke down on Friday afternoon after a confrontational meeting at the White House, where President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of ingratitude. The mineral rights deal was not signed. This is a developing story. Updates can be found on csmonitor.com.
As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy heads into a scheduled Washington meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump, the stakes involve more than the valuable rights to his country’s rare minerals.
Those natural resources are undeniably front and center in what promises to be the sort of transactional deal President Trump likes to tout, with a pay-up-or-else negotiating style.
Why We Wrote This
President Donald Trump has seemed to take Russia’s side in the Ukraine war. That makes a potential U.S. deal for rights to rare minerals in Ukraine something new – with implications for America’s role there and in Europe overall.
Still, Ukrainian officials are hoping that the plan to jointly develop the war-torn country’s resources – in opening up the promise of future cooperation with the United States – can pave the way to Kyiv’s legitimacy as an economic force that matters to America, and in this way reduce the risk of Moscow’s predatory machinations.
For this reason, the deal could be “the best security guarantee [Kyiv] could ever hope for,” U.S. national security adviser Mike Waltz argued recently.
Mr. Trump, however, has proven to be a fickle ally, which could be particularly true when it comes to Ukraine and to Mr. Zelenskyy, who played a role in his first-term impeachment by refusing to launch an investigation into President Joe Biden, as Mr. Trump had pressed him to do.
When Mr. Zelenskyy declined earlier mineral deals, Mr. Trump called him a dictator and blamed him for starting the war with Russia, leaving analysts unsure whether this was a negotiating tactic or if Mr. Trump had some other reason for using speech that so closely aligns with Russian propaganda.
In any case, as Mr. Zelenskyy has pushed for explicit U.S. security promises in the latest bargain talks, Mr. Trump has declined to make them.
“We’re going to have Europe do that,” the president said in his first Cabinet meeting Wednesday, dismissing European complaints that, without the threat of U.S. military retaliation for Russian aggression, the continent is unable to defend Ukraine on its own.
Shannon Stapleton/Reuters/File
In short, the Trump administration’s response has been an earthquake in transatlantic relations.
But this cold American posture toward longtime NATO allies could be the impetus for European leaders to undertake a long-neglected reckoning with their own nations’ security, analysts say.
By any measure, “it’s very hard to make the argument that Europe just doesn’t have the capacity to do more,” says Rajan Menon, senior research scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University.
“I’m not the least bit sympathetic to Trump,” but “the shock that he’s delivered to Europe” could ultimately help the continent achieve, he adds, “a much, much greater capacity to defend itself.”
Hard bargaining
The latest deal proposal – which will serve as a framework for continuing discussions, officials say – involves creating a fund into which Ukraine will pay half the proceeds from the future development of state-owned mineral resources like gas and oil, as well as lithium, cobalt, and titanium, which are critical for things like batteries, naval ships, and missiles.
The fund will then invest in projects in Ukraine. The U.S. will own the maximum amount of the fund allowed under U.S. law, according to The New York Times.
Mr. Zelenskyy reportedly did some hard bargaining of his own, getting Mr. Trump to back down from initial demands that Ukraine fork over $500 billion in potential mineral wealth proceeds to pay the U.S. back for the military aid.
The U.S. has sent a total of $119 billion to Ukraine, the Kiel Institute for the World Economy estimates.
The draft agreement, according to the full text published in the Kyiv Independent, also recognizes “the contribution that Ukraine has made to strengthening international peace and security by voluntarily abandoning the world’s third largest arsenal of nuclear weapons.”
Kyiv did this in 1994, in exchange for Russia and the U.S. agreeing to “respect the independence and sovereignty and existing borders of Ukraine.”
On the ground in Ukraine, despite its lack of security guarantees or even any commitment from the U.S. to supply weapons to Ukraine, word of the agreement is generating “some cautious enthusiasm” in Kyiv, says Nedim Useinow, program manager for the Ukraine Cities Partnership at the German Marshall Fund.
“There is kind of an expectation that the physical presence of the U.S. – maybe not necessarily troops, but business, money, entrepreneurs – in Ukraine will to a certain degree in the future deter Russian attacks.”
Beyond this, there are hopes that agreement has the potential to be “a major shift in Ukraine being recognized by the Western world,” he adds, as Ukraine is “integrated, slowly, economically but also politically, into the West.”
At the optimistic end of the spectrum, this could lead in turn to a “collapse of the Russian imperial ambition toward this region, a second collapse of the U.S.S.R.,” says Mr. Useinow. “Less major, smaller scale of course, but still very significant and important as we look back in 50 years at today’s events.”
Consternation over security
Yet there remain grave concerns that Ukraine will suffer in absence of American security guarantees.
Vice President JD Vance, in the run-up to negotiations, said Ukraine wouldn’t be allowed to join NATO, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has told Ukraine to give up dreams of getting any Russian-seized territory back.
This points to a U.S. that is prepared to make “massive concessions to the Kremlin in order to get this issue off the table as quickly as possible,” argues Stefan Meister, who leads the Center for Order and Governance in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia at the German Council on Foreign Relations.
Some of those concessions could include calling for new elections to replace Mr. Zelenskyy. But new presidential elections in Ukraine can’t take place until martial law is lifted.
Should this happen it could create a wave of Ukrainian refugees, resulting in the potential loss of soldiers to repel any renewed attacks by Russia. Mass migration to Europe could also stir up debate and threaten EU support for Ukraine, Dr. Meister adds.
For now, defense experts say Europe doesn’t have enough troops to enforce any future peace deals that Ukraine might ultimately agree to sign with Russia.
So in the Trump administration’s more transactional terms, European leaders need to think about what they can offer the U.S. to “create a stable contact line if there’s a ceasefire agreement,” Dr. Meister says. “I expect Trump to say: You want to have security guarantees. We want a trade deal. So let’s negotiate.”
