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.
Europe doesn't need to be a "major global player militarily", no one wants to attack Europe. And the last thing the world needs is German re-armament, we saw how that ended the last time. Russia doesn't need to be "deterred", Europe just needs to learn to get along with them like normal neighbors and stop attacking and demonizing Russia while being a bunch of stuck up racists and American bootlickers. It doesn't matter how much money you have if you don't have sovereignty. So long as Europe continues to allow itself to be a collection of US vassal states things will only get worse for us.
Wishing death and damnation on a whole nation of people to hell based solely on their place of birth? Pretty sure that constitutes as genocidal rhetoric.
What did Russia do to you? Oh that's right they liberated the death camps that gemany used for slave labor. Then they occupied half your country... to keep it from returning to nazism. They probably killed your granddaddy... who was a nazi.
You hate russia because they are the only ones who actually are committed to destroying nazis and do more than just talk about destroying fascism.
Kinda par for the course for a lot of libs right.
They wish death and destruction upon entire ethnic groups living under "dictatorships" because they all deserve it and either are 'subhuman orcs' or 'brainwashed yellow robots' amirite (despite not having "the power to vote for their governments").
But when others condemn those from the supposed liberal democratic states, all of a sudden it's "not my fault, I didn't vote for this".
The animal farm movie propaganda did proved that they direct the blame on eastern European collectively for communist takeover.