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.
I mean I hate Russia for occupying my country when we were ready to have the best possible version of socialism (Czechoslovakia, 1968) and I’m 100% convinced Putin needs to die no matter what, but I still hate the US or Germany more.
Solidarność in Poland also claimed to want “a better version of socialism” and look how that turned out. Things are not always what they are marketed to you as. I don’t know if the USSR acted exactly correctly in 1968, but i also don’t know that they didn’t prevent (or i should say delay by a couple of decades) the liberalization and destruction of socialism in Czechoslovakia by doing what they did. Some would argue that what was happening was an anti-communist coup, or at best an early version of Glasnost and Perestroika, and that the Soviets were right to put a stop to it.
Now personally i don’t know enough about the exact history of that event to say one way or another. I need to read more about it. What i do know is that it doesn’t seem right to hate an entire country for what a previous government did, particularly when that same country made great sacrifices to liberate your country from fascism.
Just out of curiosity, would you say that Yugoslavia had a better version of socialism than the USSR? Because they had a different model to the Soviet one, but theirs also didn’t survive long after the USSR fell. So let’s say Czechoslovakia did manage to achieve “the perfect version of socialism”. It was not a very big country, do you think that this version of socialism could have survived, isolated from the rest of the socialist bloc, let alone after the socialist bloc fell?
As for Putin, well we’re all going to die someday, and so is he. The question is: who will take over afterwards? Do you think it would be a communist, an even worse reactionary, or a liberal ready to sell out Russia to the West?