Washington and kyiv saved on Wednesday the last pitfalls to reach an economic agreement for the exploitation of critical mineral reserves. After weeks of pressures and comings and goings, which included a anger shouting and before the world among the presidents of the United States, Donald Trump, and Ukraine, Volodimir Zelenski, his firm will give priority access to the United States to new investment projects to exploit Ukrainian natural wealth, as Trump wanted, in order to recover part of Washington’s contributions kyiv. The pact incorporates the implicit commitment that these will continue to arrive and be sealed with the background of the conversations to end the war that began the Russian invasion of February 2022, which are stuck.
Ukraine Minister of Economy, Yulia Sviridenko, traveled Washington on Wednesday to sew the last fringes of the pact, which affects key resources such as aluminum, graphite, oil and natural gas. The announcement was made at the end of the afternoon (Washington time, at the edge of the Spanish midnight) the Department of the Treasury, which celebrated in a statement the creation of a “Reconstruction Investment Fund of the United States-Ukraine”.
The US Treasury Secretary, Scott Besent, later published a video in X, in which he says that the agreement “allows the United States to invest together with Ukraine, take advantage of the assets of its growth, mobilize talent, capital and American governance standards that will improve the investment climate and accelerate the economic recovery of the country.”
Sviridenko also looked out the social network to affirm: “With the United States, we are creating a fund that will attract global investment.”
Hours before, Besent had realized the latest difficulties in the negotiation. “Last night (on Tuesday) the Ukrainians made some changes, that we are sure that they will reconsider so that we can sign,” said the secretary of the Treasury to the question of a reporter at the end of a long meeting of the Trump cabinet, whose members praised the first 100 days of his administration.
“This agreement,” Besent added after the signature, “clearly points to Russia that the Trump administration is committed to a peace process focused on a free, sovereign and prosperous ukraine in the long term. (…) No state or person who finance or supply (resources) to the Russian war machine may take a slice of the reconstruction of Ukraine.”
In the view of the United States, there are more than 20 raw materials strategies for their interests; Among them, in addition to oil and natural gas, titanium, aeronautical use, or uranium, used to produce nuclear energy, medical equipment and weapons. Ukraine also has lithium, graphite and manganese, essential for the batteries of electric vehicles.
According to Prime Minister Ukraine, Denis Shmihal, the latest version of the Covenant establishes an egalitarian association between both countries for 10 years. The text also resolves, according to AP, Two points of the negotiation that had been in the air in recent weeks. On the one hand, the pact is not linked to any commitment to give up its entry into the European Union, as at some point intended US negotiators. On the other, it leaves Trump’s idea that the money obtained by the exploitation of these natural resources serves to return the tens of billions of dollars contributed by the United States since the beginning of the war. Its scope is limited only to the new military aid, but not to last.
The firm arrives at a symbolic moment for Trump, which turns 100 days in office, harassed by low approval rates and the bad news that speak of the first contraction of the economy since 2022. The US President has also shown in these days his impatience to ensure that Russia and Ukraine sign a peace agreement that during the campaign promised that he would foster during his first day in office.
The approximately 175,000 million dollars (about 155,000 million euros) sent by the United States to support Ukraine since the great Russian invasion began are essential for the survival of the attacked country.
Do not contradict the Constitution
The Ukrainian prime minister headed last week the delegation that outlined the one that could be a definitive agreement with the Trump administration in Washington. “We have clearly defined our red lines; the agreement must comply with European obligations and not contradict the Constitution or the Ukraine legislation,” said Shmihal through his social networks last weekend, implying that the pact was closer than ever.
It was planned that the Treaty’s signing occurred on February 28 at the White House, but this was suspended after Trump and his vice president, JD Vance, humiliated Zelenski when a conversation in the presence of the press ended up.
High American and Ukrainy positions signed an intention document in early April and left negotiations open. Last Saturday, Zelenski met with Trump in a separate one during Pope Francis’s funeral, in a gesture that was interpreted as an approach of positions between both leaders. In the 15 minutes of conversation in the middle of the Basilica of San Pedro del Vaticano, one of the issues addressed was precisely the agreement of the minerals, according to Axios.
After that meeting, Trump, while returning to the United States in the Air Force Onehe expressed for the first time in public his doubts about the true intentions of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and his willingness to end the war. He also threatened him, in a message on his social network, Truth, with new secondary sanctions and against the banking sector.
In addition to the agreement on minerals and other natural resources, the draft that has come to light from Washington to negotiate the end of the contest contemplates that the United States be done with the control of the Zaporiyia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe. These facilities, in the region of the same name, remain occupied by Kremlin military from the first days of the Russian invasion, although to function they continue depending on local employees. The Solomonic decision of the president of the United States, despite being Ukrainian territory and facilities, goes through the future electricity of that plant both to Ukrainians and Russians.
Intensification of attacks
Meanwhile, Russia has intensified its attacks on Ukraine in these weeks. A missile ended last Thursday with the life of 12 people in kyiv, in the worst attack on the capital since the summer. In the early hours of Wednesday, the city of Járkov, among others, suffered an offensive with drones that caused at least one dead and dozens of injured. The Kremlin aspires to a peace agreement that would mean winning control over four Ukrainian provinces. Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy to negotiate with President Putin, has the order to convince him to sign a pact that leaves the borders between the two countries at the height of the current front.
Ukraine has deposits of 22 of the 50 materials classified as critics by the United States geological service, and that includes rare earth resources and other essential materials for the production of electronic products, clean energy technologies and weapons. Ukraine signed in 2021 an agreement similar to the one that will link Washington from now on.
In this matter, China also appears, which leads the world production of rare land minerals and other materials of strategic importance, which has moved Western countries to seek alternatives such as the one now finds the United States in Ukraine.
Russia explodes and merchants illegally in the last decade, since it occupied the Crimean Peninsula and part of the Ukraine region of Donbás, natural resources of kyiv, as well as crops of its agricultural farms. Dozens of Russian companies in the territory of Donbás have been incorporated into the productive apparatus of the occupant forces. Some of them benefit from the illegal trade of the mines of Donbás despite the commercial restrictions and sanctions imposed on the Kremlin by the EU and the United States. Up to twenty Ukrainian farms (13 in the province of Lugansk and 7 in Donetsk) have passed throughout 2024 at the hands of companies in the invading country, according to an investigation of the medium The Kyiv Independent, that has followed the trail of those resources in the international market.
On March 29, the Russian flag ship Sv. Nikolay He was located with stolen Ukrainian coal in his wineries ready to download in the Algerian Puerto de Annaba, says this medium. Everything indicates that he sailed from the Ukrainian port of Mariupol, in the coastal area of the Black Sea that remains under Russian occupation. This exploitation is being carried out, according to that same source, with the collaboration of the environment of former President Ukraine Víktor Yanukóvich, who fled to Moscow after being accused of looting public accounts when in 2014 the current conflict began to gesture.
