Summary
Ukraine is hesitating to sign a U.S.-backed deal that would grant American companies access to 50% of its rare earth minerals in exchange for continued military support.
President Zelenskyy cited legal concerns and the lack of security guarantees.
The deal, pushed by Trump allies, aims to showcase Ukraine’s value to U.S. interests while reducing reliance on Chinese minerals.
However, Kyiv’s 2021 strategic partnership with the EU complicates negotiations, as European leaders resist surrendering shared resources to Washington. Talks remain ongoing.
Trumps idea here is much more than the usual Trump stupidity. First, Trump gets fat mineral rights for doing about nothing. The Ukraine loses 20% of its original (pre-2014) size, but gains no real security like a NATO membership. And the Europeans should work and pay for all this, while having no say in the whole thing.
This is no deal, this is rape.
You’re one hundred percent correct aside from:
theUkraine.
The audacity to frame resource extraction as “aid” would be impressive if it weren’t so transparent. Ukraine’s rare earth minerals aren’t collateral for loans—they’re the spoils of geopolitical brinkmanship, dressed in the rotting corpse of diplomacy.
Trump’s team operates like feudal overlords, demanding tribute from a nation under siege. Those minerals power everything from missiles to smartphones. Calling this a “reimbursement” is like mugging a drowning man and calling it debt collection.
Now they’re floating troop deployments to “guard” these assets? Please. This isn’t peacekeeping—it’s a protection racket, ensuring the extraction pipeline stays open while the propaganda machine spins conquest as charity.
Trump’s team operates like feudal overlords, demanding tribute from a nation under
That’s a very apt analogy. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but Trump’s demands so far remind me of his stupid nonsense about making Mexico pay for his wall back in 2016.
He honestly thinks everyone’s just going to lay down.
I figured it was more like the tributary system in imperial China
China usually gave gifts back to those states which was much more valuable than the tribute itself. Koreans were famously abusing it by sending tribute multiple times a year. China had to put a limit on them because it became a problem.
That’s a fair analogy, but even the tributary system had a veneer of mutual benefit—imperial China at least pretended to offer cultural or economic exchange. This? It’s pure extraction with none of the pretense.
The modern empire doesn’t bother with subtlety; it just calls the theft “aid” and expects applause. At least the tributary states got to keep their sovereignty on paper. Here, sovereignty is collateral damage in the race for resources.
What we’re witnessing isn’t just imperialism; it’s a corporate feudalism where nations are reduced to resource farms for the highest bidder. The tributary system had rituals; this has press releases.
Fuck, everyone has been giving us communists shit for the past 8 decades for explaining this is the exact way that imperialist powers operate in their colonies. Maybe we all will finally understand now that the Ukraine war was never a conflict of Russian expansionism vs Ukrainian national defence, but an imperialist proxy war between US and Russia?
If you’re being reductive to the point where you’re ignoring the importance of sovereignty and democracy, then it’s fair game to reduce communism to being just about some college kids that think Che Guevara T-Shirts look cool.
DONT SIGN SHUT from the Orange Retard
Hahahaha.
Dude, like half the reason of this war is about control over Ukraine’s resources.
It’s like his version of Putin’s special military operation.
Special wartime profiteering?
EU could just make him a better deal?
Poor Ukraine. One side wants to kill them all and steal the land, another side wants to rape its land, not to mention bordering Belarus, Slovakia and Hungary who are the bitches of Putin. We live in a sad reality
One side wants to kill them all
Not that I like fascist Putin, but isn’t the civilian casualty rate in Ukraine extremely low to other conflicts we’ve seen recently like the genocide in Gaza or the invasion of Iraq?
They deliberately target schools and hospitals, so take that as you will
They is unqualified, I assume you mean all of the three: US, Israel and Russia. For those who forgot or weren’t paying attention to US war crimes:
Saturday, 6 November, 2004, US strikes raze Falluja hospital
Edit: guessing from the downvotes war crimes committed by the US and Israel, or committed against Arabs and Afghans don’t count. War crimes are only bad if Russia does it. Good to know.
I think you’re going downvoted because you start off being disingenuous (“they” clearly refers to Russian invaders) and follow that up with some whataboutism.
I can assure you that the Lemmy population is quite aware of bad things being done, it having been done, by other governments. Even ones that live under those governments.
This is arguing syntax vs semantics.
Not sure what you mean. If my post reads like “understanding the written word helps” then yeah it does but that isn’t remotely what my point was.
Well, you’ve found yourself in a thread about the Ukraine-Russia conflict, so those others are irrelevant to this discussion
Fuck Hamas
Edit: hope you weren’t one of those fools that voted for Trump. He wants to turn Gaza into a strip mall or a golf course
Only because Russia is failing to do what they’ve really wanted to do since the beginning, or did you forget Bucha.
They’re still stealing children by the thousands though.
-
Require enough support from the US to push out Russia completely out of ALL occupied territories, including Crimea.
-
Require full and permanent membership of NATO
-
Allow access to 25% and only from uninhabited areas that aren’t nature reserves. Leave it up to the US to pillage and destroy the country completely
-
What happens if he signs the deal, gets the aid, beats Russia back and reneges? Serious question.
“American warship, go fuck yourself.”
The US already abandoned their promise to protect Ukraine from a Russian invasion after they agreed to give up their nuclear arsenal, so I can’t imagine why they would trust us this time especially with a nutjob like Trump at the helm.
The US promised they would not invade Ukraine, but they never promised they would protect Ukraine.
The US promised to aid Ukraine should they ever be invaded after giving up their nuclear arms. Go read the Budapest Memorandum, specifically section 4.
Like a reasonable person who sees a proposal with huge future impact - he is likely consulting lawyers (“is this permissible by law?”) and other politicians (“is this a good move currently or strategically?”).
Then comes time to present counter-proposals. One of them may be “we get considerably more help from Europe and they don’t ask for half of the country’s minerals - on this background, let’s revise assistance and security guarantees upwards”.
Trump’s current proposal is such a poorly chosen one that one could show it to Xi and ask “for this extreme price, would you reign in your vassal named Putin, and cut exports of anything with a microchip into Russia?”.
At this point I wonder who is worse Trump or Putin.
Both are worse than the other.
the ‘deal’ the diaper is working on between him and ukraine is a sham.
i think the real ‘deal’ is between him and putin: ‘give us (me) half of some of the goodies there and we’ll not stand in your way to take the whole thing’
I agree that the deal is a sham, but I think the goal was to present a deal so obviously unacceptable to Ukraine that they would be bound to refuse and Trump can then point to it and say Ukraine is uncooperative therefore he can refuse to support them any further.
not worth the paper it was printed on
Just tell the US they can have any resources they can liberate from Russia. We’d have tanks at Moscow in hours.
Which, seeing the treatment Ukraine is getting by the US, I assume you believe it’s a bad thing right? Right?
The US only does things selfishly, so yeah. Though Russia really doesn’t have it better.
Agreed, but tanks in Moscow aren’t the solution
If you thought that was a sincere suggestion, I didn’t /s nearly hard enough.
Not so much about your lack of /s, there’s widespread russophobia since 2022 in the west and many people simply don’t care what happens to so+called “orcs”
Obviously this is not something you can base a deal on, but I think a lot of the stupid shit Trump is doing will be undone if the US ever has another election. So in four years, the deal will be overturned or renegotiated. Maybe it can even be declared void?
The Republican Party controls the entire U.S. federal government.
Why would they ever willingly give that up? Because the laws say they have to? The laws they’ve been ignoring?
I hate to break it to you, but this is Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin’s party now. America died in November and gave way to some bastardized techno-autocracy-kleptocracy mutant.
Here’s a great piece to get up to speed quickly. Good luck out there! https://newrepublic.com/article/183971/jd-vance-weird-terrifying-techno-authoritarian-ideas
Handover the mineral wealth in Crimea and other occupied areas subject to them being under Ukrainian control but leave mineral wealth in free Ukraine out of the deal to provide some motivation for Dopey Donald.
Seriously. The biggest deposit is sitting in occupied land…
The biggest deposit is currently sitting in the White House.
Ukraine got used to weaken Putin and now the US sweeps in and recoups the cost for free. Ukrainians lose part of their country to Russia and hand over the minerals of the other half to America.
Imagine being Ukrainian and having died for this.
