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U.S. and Ukraine Announce a Deal

The Washington Post reports U.S. and Ukraine Announce Signing of Contentious Minerals Deal.

The United States and Ukraine have signed a deal to establish joint investment in Ukraine’s mineral wealth, oil, gas and other natural resources, officials said Wednesday, in a move that would fulfill a key White House request and give Kyiv a degree of much-desired U.S. backing.

“As the President has said, the United States is committed to helping facilitate the end of this cruel and senseless war,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said. “This agreement signals clearly to Russia that the Trump Administration is committed to a peace process centered on a free, sovereign, and prosperous Ukraine over the long term.”

The deal will establish the “United States-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund” which will allow the “two countries to work collaboratively and invest together to ensure that our mutual assets, talents, and capabilities can accelerate Ukraine’s economic recovery,” Bessent said in a statement.

The latest version of the deal, reviewed by The Washington Post, falls short of providing any concrete security guarantees to Ukraine, but it states that Kyiv and Washington agree it affirms a “long-term strategic alignment” between the two countries and U.S. “support for Ukraine’s security, prosperity, reconstruction, and integration into global economic frameworks.”

That language alone marks a win for Kyiv, which has been seeking any show of support from the U.S. since the relationship between the two countries turned rocky under President Donald Trump. Ukraine will seek significantly more tangible security guarantees under any future peace deal.

This agreement makes no mention of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest such facility in Europe, which Russia violently seized in early 2022 and now occupies. U.S. officials have proposed taking control of the plant as part of a future deal to end the war.

The latest draft of the deal adjusts several key points that Ukraine had objected to in past versions. Kyiv had, for example, raised concerns over language in a different draft that it feared could have put it in violation of European Union laws by offering advantages to American investors.

Ukraine is urgently attempting to join the bloc of nations and must ensure that its laws conform to it. The text includes a provision that protects Ukraine from any binding agreement that may hamper its goal of E.U. accession. It also allows for the possibility of future good-faith negotiations to rewrite parts of the deal if Ukraine legally must do so.

The draft also nixes old language that would have set Ukraine up to reimburse Washington for past U.S. military aid.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said Wednesday that the two sides were finalizing “technical details” regarding the deal, which he described as a “milestone” for Ukraine.

Still, the deal reflects largely hypothetical questions given the substantial uncertainty over the future of the sector in Ukraine, said Oleg Ustenko, who served as an economic adviser to Zelensky.

“Trump wants to present this as a victory for the Americans, but it’s not Trump who will invest, and it’s not the U.S. who will invest — you need the private sector,” Ustenko said. “So I think it’s more symbolic than anything else right now.”

Alex Jacquez, who served as a senior official on minerals in the Biden administration, said it’s extremely unlikely Ukraine has the ability to develop a new mining industry in lithium or rare earth metals, calling the trillions of dollars in natural resources claimed by the Trump administration to be illusory. Ukraine does have a large iron ore industry, but the draft agreement does not appear to include it.

“The bottom line is Ukraine has deposits of a variety of critical minerals being valued at essentially imaginary numbers,” Jacquez said. “There is a reason few of these mining projects are actually being developed outside of China — under current economic conditions, it makes little sense for investors.”

It’s a Start

This is good news.

It is mostly irrelevant if the mining prospects are slim. What matters is Trump thinks the minerals are there and minable.

Perhaps Trump will put a bit more pressure on Russia now that he thinks he has something to protect.

But where is Secretary of State Marco Rubio hiding? He is the one who should be involved in these discussions, not Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary.

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