Ukraine has reportedly agreed with the Trump administration terms of a contentious rare earth mineral deal, with Volodymyr Zelensky expected to meet the US President on Friday.
Officials in Kyiv hope the mineral deal will pave the way for better relations with the US after President Donald Trump traded a series of public insults with his Ukrainian counterpart last week.
The terms are believed to be more favourable than those laid out in a first draft, which sparked consternation in Kyiv and across Europe.
Trump told reporters on Tuesday that Zelensky was “coming to visit on Friday”, and said the Ukrainian president “would like to sign the minerals deal with me”.
“We have pretty much negotiated our deal on rare earths,” he added, while multiple reports suggested a framework for the deal had already been struck.
Trump said Ukraine gained “the right to fight on” in exchange for signing the agreement.
“They’re very brave,” he said, adding however: “Without the United States and its money and its military equipment, this war would have been over in a very short period of time.”
Olha Stefanishyna, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister and justice minister who has led the negotiations, said the agreement was “only part of the picture”, telling the Financial Times: “We have heard multiple times from the US administration that it’s part of a bigger picture.”
The final version of the deal, seen by the newspaper, would see the two countries jointly develop Ukraine’s mineral wealth, with the profits going to a shared fund.
Trump originally demanded $500bn worth of mineral riches to compensate for previous American aid to Ukraine, without providing any future security guarantees.
The new deal is still not believed to refer to American security guarantees and omits details on the size of America’s stake in the fund and the terms of “joint ownership” deals.
After Zelensky rejected the original terms last week, Trump lashed out at the Ukrainian leader, calling him a “dictator without elections”, vastly exaggerated the amount of aid the US had given Ukraine three years on from Russia’s invasion and blamed Kyiv for starting the war.
The White House later told Zelensky to “tone down” his own comments, which included that Trump lives in a Russian “disinformation space”.
Ukraine holds huge deposits of critical elements and minerals, including lithium and titanium, vital to the manufacturing of many modern technologies. It also has vast reserves of coal, oil, gas and uranium.
Zelensky had previously floated the idea of allowing the US access to Ukraine’s natural resources as part of a “victory plan” that the president presented to the country’s allies last year.
On Friday, he told Reuters: “The Americans helped the most and therefore the Americans should earn the most.”
Ukrainian officials said that the deal had been approved by the justice, economy and foreign ministers.
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