The U.S. and Ukraine have officially signed an agreement granting the U.S. access to Ukraine's mineral resources. Two parties inked the deal two months after a heated meeting at the White House between two presidents, Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, abruptly ended the negotiations.
"Thanks to President Trump's tireless efforts to secure a lasting peace, I am glad to announce the signing of today's historic economic partnership agreement between the United States and Ukraine establishing the United States-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund," said U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, per The Kobeissi Letter.
"Together with the United States, we are creating the Fund that will attract global investment into our country," Ukrainian First Vice Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko wrote on X.
Under the agreement, the U.S. will have priority access to new investment projects involving Ukrainian critical minerals. Kyiv and Washington will establish an investment fund, through which profits will be funneled, aiming to support Ukraine's recovery and offset future U.S. military assistance.
Trump initially demanded $500 billion worth of mineral wealth as repayment for U.S. military aid, but Ukraine pushed back, seeking security guarantees in return. Reuters confirmed that the signed deal does not require Ukraine to repay past military aid and doesn't contain any concrete U.S. security guarantees.
Ukraine holds substantial reserves of rare earth elements essential for the technology, defense, and clean energy industries. It is the sixth-largest global producer of Titanium, although production has been on a decline since 2012.
Still, nearly half of mineral deposits are concentrated in Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk, Kirovohrad, Poltava, and Kharkiv--territories that are partly under Russian control, complicating extraction efforts.
Marko Papic, Chief Strategist at BCA Research, warned that resource extraction is just one part of the equation.
"Even if you somehow manage to get the rare earths out, the question would be--where do you refine them? The fact is that most of them would have to go to China. That's the critical bottleneck in this whole situation."
This deal is a good example of Trump's transactional approach to foreign policy and leveraging economic incentives to build domestic support.
"This is something President Trump does over and over again," Papic noted. "The theater surrounding his deals, the back-and-forth, is designed to build domestic consensus, particularly among his voters."
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