WASHINGTON — President Trump expressed interest Monday in tying continued aid to Ukraine to the US getting access to rare earth minerals from the war-torn country.
“We’re looking to do a deal with Ukraine where they’re going to secure what we’re giving them with their rare earth and other things,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, adding that he wants a “guarantee” in exchange for US money.
“We’re handing them money hand over fist. We’re giving them equipment. [The] European [Union] is not keeping up with us.”
Trump, 78, had previously vowed to end the three-year-old war between Russia and Ukraine in the first days of his administration.
Ukraine is one of the largest rare earth mineral suppliers in the world, and has the largest titanium reserves in Europe.
The country also boasts deposits of lithium, beryllium, manganese, gallium, uranium, zirconium, graphite, apatite, fluorite, and nickel, per the World Economic Forum.
Russian forces have already taken parts of Eastern Ukraine that had historically provided the rest of the country with key minerals, notably much of the coal-supplying Donbas region.
But other parts of Ukraine, including the Dnieper River basin that runs through the center of the country and the Carpathian Mountains in the West, have massive supply of minerals and natural gas under Kyiv’s control.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had expressed willingness to provide minerals in exchange for the US continuing to give military aid in its war against Russia, according to a readout provided after Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) visited Ukraine last year.
“President Zelensky was excited about and was committed to obtaining a strategic agreement with the US regarding the more than a trillion dollars-worth of rare earth minerals owned by Ukraine and expressed a commitment to create a working group with the US to make this happen,” the senators said in a joint statement in August.
That was an excellent video. It put into words something that always bothered me but i could never quite express or even fully comprehend myself. As someone who immigrated to Germany and experienced first hand how the topic is addressed in schools but who always felt like an outsider looking in, there was always something obscene about how they almost seemed to take a kind of perverse pride in how they deal with their past. When the real lesson of what they did should have been “we should learn how this happened and never allow this to happen again to anyone anywhere”, instead it became “look how good we are at admitting our guilt, and because we did the worst thing ever now we are experts in recognizing when someone is doing bad things or not”. Yet when push came to shove they immediately sided with the genociders over the victims, which laid bare their insincerity for all to see.
Of course this doesn’t apply to all Germans, i have German friends who have always been sincere about this, who are ardent anti-fascists, who made an effort to really educate themselves and not just engage in this performative virtue signaling and who see the atrocities that our government is supporting in occupied Palestine and are disgusted and appalled. But our institutions at this point are full on pro-genocide, and they’re only getting worse and more repressive.
And when the SMO started, they immediately sided with the guys waving the fascist flags.
I wouldn’t have believed it if someone said it to me before 2022 but now i truly believe that the German ruling class has never actually accepted their defeat at the hands of Russia and were just itching to get a second chance to do what they failed to do in WW2. They were just giddy at seeing German tanks kill Russians again. Nothing else explains the sheer bloodthirsty enthusiasm with which they have thrown themselves into this new anti-Russia crusade. And so far, they have partly succeeded, as just like last time Nazis have managed to take over the Baltics and a large part of Ukraine. But they will lose again all the same. Because last time they made it to Stalingrad and the gates of Moscow, whereas this time they couldn’t even make it to Kursk.