Donald Trump wants Ukraine to pay for financial and military support by affording Washington access to the country’s vast but untapped rare earth minerals.
The US president announced last week that the war-torn country was on board with his plan, potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
“We’re telling Ukraine they have very valuable rare earths,” Mr Trump said. “I told them that I want the equivalent of like $500 billion worth of rare earths, and they’ve essentially agreed to do that.”
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said he is ready to do a deal with Mr Trump that includes U.S. involvement in developing Ukraine’s huge deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals.
The Kremlin jumped on the comments, saying it demonstrated the US is no longer willing to provide free aid to Kyiv, before adding, what it was against Mr Trump giving any help to Ukraine whatsoever.
Below, we look at where these resources are in Ukraine, and why Kyiv has struggled to mine these minerals.
Ukraine is sitting on one of Europe’s largest deposits of critical minerals, including lithium and titanium, much of which is untapped. According to the Institute of Geology, Ukraine possesses rare earth elements such as lanthanum and cerium, used in TVs and lighting; neodymium, used in wind turbines and EV batteries; and erbium and yttrium, whose applications range from nuclear power to lasers. The EU-funded research also indicates that Ukraine has scandium reserves but detailed data is classified.
Mr Zelensky has been trying to develop these resources, estimated to be worth more than £12 trillion, based on figures provided by Forbes Ukraine, for years.
In 2021, he offered outside investors tax breaks and investment rights to help mine these minerals. These efforts were suspended when the full-scale invasion started a year later.
Anticipating the notoriously transactional Mr Trump might take an interest in this, Mr Zelensky then placed the mining of these minerals into his victory plan, which was drawn up last year.
The minerals are vital for electric vehicles and other clean energy efforts, as well as defence production.
Estimates based on government documents suggest that Ukraine’s resources are also highly varied. Foreign Policy found that Ukraine held “commercially relevant deposits of 117 of the 120 most-used industrial minerals across more than 8,700 surveyed deposits”.
Included in that is half a million tonnes of lithium, none of which has been tapped. This makes Ukraine the largest lithium resource in Europe.
Ukraine’s reserves of graphite, a key component in electric vehicle batteries and nuclear reactors, represent 20% of global resources. The deposits are in the centre and west.
