US, Ukraine to Sign Rare Earth Minerals Deal, Trump Says
President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would sign a deal giving the United States substantial rights to Kyiv's lucrative rare earth minerals and compensate Washington for weapons sent to Ukraine to fight Russia's three-year war of aggression.
Zelenskyy will be at the White House on Friday to sign the pact and discuss the state of the war, Trump said at the first Cabinet meeting of his new presidential term.
The deal "brings us great wealth," Trump said, but his first goal is to end the war, which has killed or wounded several hundred thousand Russian and Ukrainian soldiers and Ukrainian civilians.
"My No. 2 thing is to get paid back," Trump said of the more than $100 billion in munitions Washington has shipped to Kyiv to support its fighters. "Without our equipment, that [war] would have been over very quickly," with Russia overrunning Ukraine.
As it is, Russia now controls about a fifth of Ukraine's internationally recognized territory and has vowed to not give any of it back in a would-be peace settlement.
Trump said he expected to eventually reach a deal with Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the fighting. Trump initiated talks with Putin about ending the conflict, but the first discussions last week between the top U.S. and Russian diplomats, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, excluded Ukrainian and European officials.
"Because I got elected, this war is going to come to an end," Trump declared. He said Putin "had no intention of settling this. We're going to have a deal."
Analysts said this deal was part of Zelenskyy's original peace formulation.
"So, it is difficult for the Ukrainian government to completely go back on the offer," said Olena Prokopenko, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund and a former adviser to Ukraine's finance minister.
"Unfortunately, the draft deal offered to Ukraine in response to this proposal was quite disappointing and quite one-sided. But now that the arrangement seems to be much more balanced, the Ukrainian government is ready to sign it," she said.
Prokopenko said she expected some finessing before the deal was signed.
"There's some progress in terms of mentioning guarantees as a factor, but it will have to be much more detailed in the final deal, because at the moment there is no specific connection, basically, between security and investments," she said. "As of now, it looks like an investment deal, but not as a security deal."
Trump also said Wednesday that Ukraine "could forget about" joining NATO, the West's main military alliance, as part of a peace settlement.
Source : VOA
