Critical minerals are all the rage right now.
Ever since President Donald Trump indicated he wanted access to Ukraine’s natural resources industry in exchange for U.S. aid amid the country’s war with Russia – an idea originally floated by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a way to help fund the military effort – much has been said and written about critical minerals and rare earths. And the conversation is persisting even after an Oval Office blow-up between the two presidents last week threatened to kill the deal.
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During his address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night, Trump said he will take “historic action to dramatically expand production of critical minerals and rare earths here in the USA.” He also read aloud a letter from Zelenskyy himself, which noted Ukraine is “ready to sign” the minerals agreement “at any time that is convenient.”
Whether the deal comes to fruition is not a certainty. But as negotiations previously stood, the bilateral agreement would establish a “reconstruction investment fund” owned jointly by the two countries. Ukraine would contribute 50% of “all revenues earned from the future monetization of all Ukrainian government-owned natural resource assets into the fund,” including mineral deposits, oil, natural gas and other relevant infrastructure, according to a breakdown by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based nonprofit research organization.
“We are in an era of transactional foreign policy,” says Gracelin Baskaran, director of the Critical Minerals Security Program at CSIS and co-author of the article about the deal.
Here’s what to know about Ukraine’s minerals and why Trump is so focused on them.
What Are Rare Earths?
First of all, Baskaran says, they should not be conflated with critical minerals – a term covering a wider range of resources. Rare earths make up a group of 17 elements that aren’t actually that rare but are “extremely difficult and expensive to extract and separate.” They are “really important” for national security because they’re in virtually every type of defense technology, such as warships, tanks, munitions, satellites and lasers. Rare earths also are found in advanced semiconductors, wind turbines and even an electric vehicle’s motor, she says.
While China, for instance, is the world’s largest producer of rare earths, the U.S. has a limited supply and wants “to start sourcing from elsewhere,” Baskaran adds.
What Critical Minerals Does Ukraine Have?
The catch: It’s unclear which rare earth elements Ukraine has access to, if any. Baskaran notes in an opinion piece published by The New York Times that there is no modern mapping of the country’s rare earth deposits, with the most recent surveys believed to have been conducted decades ago by the Soviet Union. Those surveys are not only old, but “not robust at all,” adds Morgan Bazilian, a professor and director of the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines.
“The media and even parts of the administration are using the term incorrectly,” he says, referring to rare earth elements. “The point is that rare earths are not really and should not be the focus of any Ukraine deal. The country itself, I don’t believe, has ever produced rare earth.”
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Ukraine does have other valuable commodities that don’t fall specifically in the rare earth element bucket but the U.S. still identifies as critical, such as graphite and titanium, according to Baskaran. The country also has produced manganese and has the “potential for reserves” of uranium and lithium, Bazilian says.
And the U.S. isn’t the only country interested in Ukraine’s minerals. France has been negotiating with Kyiv for months over mineral rights. Unlike the Trump deal, the French are not framing it as payback for assistance provided but as a revenue stream for the cash-strapped nation to secure resources as it continues to defend itself from Russian aggression.
In fact, long-time analyst Paul Goble suggested in his “Window on Eurasia” blog shortly after the Russian invasion that one of President Vladimir Putin’s motivations was to secure Ukraine’s rare earth minerals and later in an analysis for the Jamestown Foundation tied it to a plan by Moscow to help China corner the global market on the precious resources.
Why Does Trump Want Access to Ukraine’s Minerals Industry?
On one hand, it’s a lever that can be pulled to help put Ukraine and Russia on the path to peace, and Baskaran says “ending war is in everyone’s interest.” It’s also, though, a way for Trump to “get something out of” the process – even if it’s really a long-term play. From Ukraine’s perspective, she adds, there is a lot of upside with the “potential economic recovery and investment” tied to the deal.
“The economic opportunities for these things matter a great deal more than where they sit in the earth’s crust,” Bazilian says, while adding there must come the “understanding that standing up a mining sector in a war-torn country is extremely difficult.”
The unfolding U.S.-Ukraine minerals talks, even if a deal is not finalized, could act as a blueprint for similar transactional negotiations with other countries as well. Officials from Congo recently pitched the U.S. on providing access to the country’s own critical minerals in exchange for security assistance amid its conflict with Rwanda. And Trump’s interest in taking over Greenland, a Danish territory, is reportedly rooted at least in part in its mineral deposits.
But the minerals craze also could be just a phase.
“I don’t think that they will stay at this level of political prioritization,” Bazilian says. “Nothing does.”
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