President Donald Trump on Thursday said the United States and Ukraine would sign an agreement giving America access to much of Ukraine’s mineral wealth next week, more than a month after a planned White House signing ceremony with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was aborted after a disastrous meeting between him and Trump in the Oval Office.
Trump announced the revived agreement and said it would be signed a week from today as he spoke to reporters alongside Italian prime minister Georgia Meloni on Thursday.
“Well, we have a minerals deal, which I guess is going to be signed on Thursday … and I assume they’re going to live up to the deal, so we’ll see,” he said.
The president’s announcement indicates that relations between Washington and Kyiv — which have taken a downward turn since Trump’s inauguration on account of his administration’s generally pro-Russian outlook — are on the mend weeks after a public spat between Trump and Zelensky brought them to a nadir even as Russia has stepped up attacks on Ukrainian civilians and infrastructure to take advantage of Trump’s reluctance to provide Kyiv with more military aid.
The revived minerals deal is a sign that both countries have agreed on allowing American access to exploit Ukrainian mineral deposits in exchange for continued financial and military aid. It comes as Trump has continued to tout pro-Russian narratives about the causes of the three-year-old war between Moscow and Kyiv and blame Zelensky for starting the war, which was in reality started by Russia.
The president has also repeatedly demanded access to Ukrainian mineral wealth and concessions to future development rights as a form of compensation for the aid that the U.S. has given Kyiv since Russia launched an unprovoked invasion in February 2022.
While Trump claims that past aid should be treated as loans and debt for Ukraine to repay, Kyiv has refused to accept his framing of the situation.
Meanwhile, Moscow has continued to rain down aerial attacks on the Ukrainian population even as Trump has tried to engage Russia in what he has described as peace talks that were supposed to have resulted in at least a temporary ceasefire weeks ago.
While the Ukrainian government had agreed to pause attacks on energy infrastructure as an opening measure, Russian forces never stopped targeting Ukraine’s power grid or civilian targets. But Trump has refused to provide Kyiv with further defensive aid, including the U.S. built anti-aircraft missiles that Ukrainian forces have been using to repel Russian attacks from above.
The president has continued to blame Zelensky for the war started by Russia, and Trump’s Ukraine envoy, retired lieutenant general Keith Kellogg, told The Times last week that one way to end the war could be to partition Ukraine in a manner similar to how Germany was split asunder at the end of the Second World War.
Under the plan floated by Kellogg, the eastern half would be occupied by Russia, while an Anglo-French force could patrol the western half of Ukraine with the two forces separated by a demilitarized zone.
“You could almost make it look like what happened with Berlin after World War Two, when you had a Russian zone, a French zone, and a British zone, a US zone,” he said, adding the caveat that America would not contribute any ground forces to secure Ukraine.
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