Ukraine says it has reached a “preliminary” deal to hand revenue from some of its critical mineral resources to the US, with preparations under way for Volodymyr Zelenskyy to visit the White House to sign the agreement on Friday.
The announcement followed days of tense negotiations between Washington and Kyiv in which the Ukrainian president alleged the US was pressuring him to sign an earlier deal worth more than $500bn (£395bn) that he said would force 10 generations of his people to pay it back.
What are the details of the deal?
Donald Trump presented the initial US proposal as a means for Ukraine to repay Washington for military and financial aid since Russia’s 2022 invasion. After it was rejected, a new agreement seen as more accommodating for Kyiv was drafted.
The new terms do not include the onerous demand that would have given the US the right to $500bn in potential revenue from exploiting Ukrainian resources, which included oil and gas as well as minerals.
“The main thing for me is we are not debtors. There is no $500bn debt in the agreement … because that would be unfair,” Zelenskyy told a news briefing on Wednesday.
The deal still does not include references to long-term US security guarantees that Kyiv wanted, to protect a postwar Ukraine from Russian attacks. “This agreement could be part of future security guarantees … an agreement is an agreement, but we need to understand the broader vision,” Zelenskyy said.
The Ukrainian prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, described the deal as preliminary, and there was uncertainty as to whether Zelenskyy’s trip to Washington would go ahead.
Asked on Tuesday what Ukraine would receive under the deal, Trump said: “$350bn, military equipment and the right to fight on.” He added: “We’ve pretty much negotiated our deal on [rare earths] and various other things. We’ll be looking [at] general security for Ukraine later on.”
What are critical minerals?
Critical minerals are the metals and other raw materials needed for the production of hi-tech products, particularly those associated with the green energy transition, but also consumer electronics, artificial intelligence infrastructure, and weapons.
The rush to tackle climate breakdown and move away from fossil fuels has triggered a scramble for energy transition minerals such as cobalt, copper, lithium and nickel, which are useful for the electrification of transport and the construction of wind turbines. The same minerals and others are also used for the manufacture of mobile phones, AI datacentres and military assets such as F-35 fighter aircraft, placing them in high demand.
As the world’s economy and technology transforms, the value of critical minerals has soared and geopolitical competition for access to them is rising. In 2023, the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimated that the market for energy transition minerals had reached £320bn in 2022, double its value five years earlier. And if countries fully implement their clean energy and climate pledges, demand is expected to more than double by 2030 and triple by 2040, the agency says.
Which minerals are regarded as critical?
The term critical minerals is not a scientific term so much as a political one, and different countries have different lists of critical minerals depending on their domestic and geopolitical objectives.
In 2022, the US Geological Survey (USGS) published a list of 50 minerals, from aluminium to zirconium, that it regarded as “play[ing] a significant role in our national security, economy, renewable energy development and infrastructure”. Notable inclusions were arsenic, for semiconductors; beryllium, used as an alloying agent in aerospace and defence industries; cobalt, lithium and graphite, crucial for manufacturing batteries; indium, which makes screens respond to a finger touch; and tellurium, which is used for solar power generation.
The US’s Energy Act stipulates that the list must be updated every three years, which means this year it will be up for review, and it will be interesting to see which minerals appear or disappear given the new political environment in the country.
What are rare earth elements?
Rare earth elements (REEs) are a subset of 17 critical minerals that are variously indispensable for mobile phones, electric vehicles, missile guidance systems and other electronic, industrial and energy applications.
Despite their name, most of the rare earth elements are not particularly rare, but their extraction and refining is fiendishly difficult – and environmentally highly destructive – meaning production is concentrated in very few places, mainly China.
REEs include europium, used in nuclear power station control rods; dysprosium, gandolinium and praseodymium, used in the magnets in your mobile phone; and gadolinium, holmium and ytterbium, used in lasers, among other things.
What critical minerals does Ukraine have?
A 2022 article by the chair of Ukraine’s Association of Geologists, Hanna Liventseva, claimed her country contained about 5% of the world’s mineral resources, despite covering only 0.4% of the globe’s surface, thanks to a complex geology that takes in all three of the main components of the earth’s crust.
According to Ukraine’s own data, cited by Reuters, the country has deposits of 22 of the 34 minerals identified as critical by the EU, including rare earths such as lanthanum, cerium, neodymium, erbium and yttrium.
Before the outbreak of war with Russia, Ukraine was a key supplier of titanium, producing about 7% of global output in 2019, according to European Commission research. It also claimed about 500,000 tonnes of lithium reserves, and one-fifth of the world’s graphite, a crucial component of nuclear power stations.
However, with Russia controlling about one-fifth of Ukraine’s territory, a lot of these reserves have been lost. According to estimates by Ukrainian thinktanks cited by Reuters, up to 40% of Ukraine’s metal resources are in land under occupation. Russian troops also hold at least two of Ukraine’s lithium deposits, one in Donetsk and another in Zaporizhzhia.
Why does Donald Trump want Ukraine’s critical minerals so much?
There is one big reason Trump is so keen to get his hands on Ukraine’s critical minerals: China. More than ever, the Asian superpower is the world’s factory and that means, wherever in the world critical minerals are torn from the ground, it remains a crucial staging point on the supply chain.
Most of the world’s processing capacity for critical minerals is in China. According to the IEA, China’s share of refining is about 35% for nickel, 50-70% for lithium and cobalt, and nearly 90% for REEs. Its dominance in the latter, especially, is overwhelming. According to USGS data, in 2024 China accounted for almost half the world’s REE reserves.
With Trump effectively instigating a trade war with China with his imposition of steep tariffs on Chinese goods, US access to critical minerals is potentially under threat. As mentioned earlier, the world is being gripped by an unseemly scramble for mineral wealth. They are the building blocks of the economy of the future, and if the US does not get its hands on them, someone else will.
