The U.S. president’s relentless pursuit of raw materials is storing up trouble for Greenland, but could well be good news for Ukraine.
After years of arguing its democracy is worth fighting for, Ukraine quickly calculated Donald Trump was likelier to think the country is worth saving because of its abundant mineral wealth.
To win over a United States president who wants to claim Greenland for its vast reserves of raw materials and strategic position in the Arctic, Kyiv has for months been stressing that its rich deposits of everything from titanium to graphite could help Trump beat China in the global race for resources.
On Monday, Trump took the bait and said he planned to make a deal with Ukraine “where they will secure what we’re providing them with their rare earth materials and other resources.”
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz saw the move to tie future military aid to mineral access as appallingly transactional and criticized it as “very egotistic, very self-centered.”
Kyiv realizes, however, that the focus on its minerals is vital to continued U.S. support — and therefore the country’s survival — so it deliberately tailored its message to Trump’s commercial instincts. Knowing he would not be swayed by pleas to protect democracy, Kyiv played up the dangers of metals that are vital for industrial and military technologies falling into Moscow’s — and therefore China’s — grasp.
“Overall, this is a positive signal,” Oleksandr Merezhko, head of the foreign relations committee in the Ukrainian parliament, told POLITICO. “I think that Trump has begun to understand that there is a danger that Ukraine’s strategic resources, if not helped, could end up in the hands of authoritarian regimes, and strengthen these regimes. And not only Russia, but also its strategic partner China,” he added.
After long fearing that Trump’s administration would simply turn its back on Ukraine, Kyiv now has some grounds for very cautious optimism. The U.S. president’s suggestion that he would continue supporting Ukraine in return for minerals follows his appeal to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin last month that he should end the “ridiculous war” or face far tougher sanctions.
Ukraine isn’t wasting time on trying to seal a deal with Trump. Hours after fossil fuel executive Chris Wright was confirmed as Trump’s energy secretary, his Ukrainian counterpart Herman Halushchenko sent him a letter thanking the U.S. for its strategic partnership and saying 50 percent of Ukraine’s critical energy infrastructure has been destroyed and sustaining it would be important for Trump to maintain leverage on Moscow.
In the letter, seen by POLITICO, Halushchenko said Ukraine was ready to work with the Trump administration to fashion a strategic commercial stake for the U.S. in Ukraine’s energy sector, stressing that the country possesses some of the world’s largest deposits of oil, gas, uranium and other natural resources.
How Ukraine got Trump’s attention
Ukraine has deposits of 22 of the 50 materials the U.S. has identified as critical (of the European Union’s 34-item list, it has deposits of 25 of them). The country is particularly rich in graphite, lithium, titanium, beryllium and uranium, per the Ukrainian Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources. The resources are essential to manufacture batteries, radar systems and armor — key to the defense and tech industries — and would go some way to reducing U.S. reliance on Chinese minerals.
Republicans have long recognized the strategic value of Ukraine’s resources. “I don’t want to give that money and those assets to Putin to share with China,” Senator Lindsey Graham said last year. “If we help Ukraine now, they can become the best business partner we ever dreamed of.”
Ukraine’s titanium reserves are “in the top league,” a European raw materials expert who spoke with POLITICO on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the conversation said. “Ukrainians are obviously looking for whatever attracts Trump’s attention. And this definitely has captured his attention.”
The resource argument “is very digestible for Donald Trump and the Trump administration in terms of Ukraine’s value,” said Daniel Vajdich, a Republican foreign policy expert who now counsels Ukrainian state agencies in his capacity as president of lobby shop Yorktown Solutions.
“Whereas for a lot of folks in the previous administration supporting Ukraine was about freedom and democracy, that doesn’t resonate with Trump … we need other reasons to draw them in to why supporting Ukraine and fighting for Ukraine makes sense.”
Sensing the threat, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov on Tuesday slammed Trump’s proposal, saying: “If we call things as they are, this is a proposal to buy help — in other words, not to give it unconditionally, or for some other reasons, but specifically to provide it on a commercial basis.”
It sure is.
Mining among mines
As early as September, several months before Trump won the U.S. election, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy began to push the idea that it was in America’s (and others’) economic interests to help Kyiv beat back Russia’s assault and regain as much of its territory as possible.
In his so-called victory plan, Zelenskyy offered allies a special agreement for the joint protection of and investment in Ukraine’s natural resources and critical metals worth trillions of U.S. dollars, including uranium, titanium, lithium, graphite and others.
But there’s a catch: Many of Ukraine’s resources are concentrated in the country’s east and south, in the areas hardest hit by the war, which are either contested or occupied by the Russian army. One of Ukraine’s most resource-rich regions, Dnipropetrovsk, is currently under threat, with Russian forces tightening their grip around Pokrovsk.
“Does Trump realize that the territories where rare earths occur are largely occupied and need to be liberated?” said Michael Gonchar, the president of the Centre for Global Studies Strategy XXI NGO. “For this, American weapons and truly hellish sanctions against the aggressor are needed.”
The bargain, as Ukraine sees it: Help us win back our lands, and we’ll be the friendly mining giant on your doorstep.
“Look what is involved here,” said Oleksandr Kubrakov, co-founder of the We Build Ukraine analytical center and former deputy prime minister of Ukraine. “This industry is not about medium-sized small business, it is an industry about billions of dollars of investments.”
The bargain will come at a cost to Ukraine — but it’s likely one worth paying.
“It would mean a lot less mineral wealth in future,” said Peter Dickinson, editor of the UkraineAlert blog at the Eurasia Center and publisher of Business Ukraine and Lviv Today magazines. “But I doubt anyone is very concerned about that,” he added. “Compared to the alternative of the country being wiped off the map entirely, it looks like a very good deal indeed! Most Ukrainians certainly seem to view it as perhaps distasteful but ultimately a no-brainer. »
Still, asked whether Ukrainian officials believe Trump might give Kyiv enough military support to help them regain territories occupied by the Russians, Vajdich, the Republican foreign policy expert who now lobbies for Ukraine, said that wasn’t his impression. “Nor do I think that Ukrainian officials necessarily believe that means Trump will support Ukraine until they retake all of those territories where critical materials are located. I don’t think that’s the center of gravity of thinking.”
