WASHINGTON — President Trump expressed interest Monday in tying continued aid to Ukraine to the US getting access to rare earth minerals from the war-torn country.
“We’re looking to do a deal with Ukraine where they’re going to secure what we’re giving them with their rare earth and other things,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, adding that he wants a “guarantee” in exchange for US money.
“We’re handing them money hand over fist. We’re giving them equipment. [The] European [Union] is not keeping up with us.”
Trump, 78, had previously vowed to end the three-year-old war between Russia and Ukraine in the first days of his administration.
Ukraine is one of the largest rare earth mineral suppliers in the world, and has the largest titanium reserves in Europe.
The country also boasts deposits of lithium, beryllium, manganese, gallium, uranium, zirconium, graphite, apatite, fluorite, and nickel, per the World Economic Forum.
Russian forces have already taken parts of Eastern Ukraine that had historically provided the rest of the country with key minerals, notably much of the coal-supplying Donbas region.
But other parts of Ukraine, including the Dnieper River basin that runs through the center of the country and the Carpathian Mountains in the West, have massive supply of minerals and natural gas under Kyiv’s control.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had expressed willingness to provide minerals in exchange for the US continuing to give military aid in its war against Russia, according to a readout provided after Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) visited Ukraine last year.
“President Zelensky was excited about and was committed to obtaining a strategic agreement with the US regarding the more than a trillion dollars-worth of rare earth minerals owned by Ukraine and expressed a commitment to create a working group with the US to make this happen,” the senators said in a joint statement in August.
Trump has continued to say that he wants to host negotiations between Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin to reach a deal to end the war.
“We made a lot of progress on Russia-Ukraine,” he said in the Oval Office Monday without going into details.
Over the weekend, Zelensky floated the idea of four-way talks involving Ukraine, Russia, the European Union and the US, but Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Monday that such a proposal has not been discussed in a “serious way.”
