Report: Trump's Ukraine Mineral Deal Has Been 'Improved'

The Trump administration is still pushing for a deal for mineral rights in Ukraine after disagreements over the issue led to a very public falling out between President Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky. The Wall Street Journal reports that the administration has doubled down on demands for Ukraine to sign away rights to hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of rare earth minerals and other strategic minerals, though Zelensky has complained that the proposed deal doesn't come with security guarantees. "They need to tone it down and take a hard look and sign that deal," national security adviser Mike Waltz said Thursday.

• Negotiations. Sources tell Axios that the administration has given Ukraine an "improved" draft of a minerals deal, and Zelensky's aides have urged him to sign it to avoid further confrontation with Trump. One source says there was "significant improvement in the recent draft and it is in conformity with Ukrainian law."

• The earlier deal. Sources tell CNN that the deal Zelensky rejected focused on compensating the US for past aid with no guarantees of aid in the future. According to Axios' sources, it called for the US to receive 50% of mining revenue, overriding Ukraine's other trade agreements. Zelensky said Wednesday that he was open to a deal, but he thought the US demand for $500 billion in compensation for earlier aid was excessive. He said the amount of aid Ukraine had received was around $100 billion.
• The falling out. A GOP lawmaker tells the Journal that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent presented the deal to Zelensky in Kyiv last week, telling him, "You really need to sign this." Zelensky took the paper but did not commit to signing. Sources tell Axios that Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio tried to get Zelensky to sign the deal at the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 14, but he said he needed approval from his country's parliament. Trump stepped up his attacks on Zelensky after the Ukrainian leader publicly rejected the deal the next day.

• "Blackmail demands." Keir Giles, a Russia expert at the Chatham House think tank in the UK, tells the CBC that the push for a resource deal amounts to "blackmail demands" after the administration reached out to Vladimir Putin. "The problem Ukraine has is that the demands that are being presented by the United States are not significantly worse than what has been demanded by Russia," he says.
• The minerals. Ukraine's deposits of critical minerals are believed to be worth trillions of dollars, but many of them are in territory claimed by Russia—and getting them out of the ground won't be simple. "Rare-earth mines require an incredible amount of capital expenditure to get them off the ground," George Ingall at Benchmark Minerals Intelligence tells the Wall Street Journal. "There are a lot of mines in the US struggling to get investment to even start mining. This seems more like a geopolitical plan than an actual play to have more control over rare earth supplies."
• Russia pushes for lithium deposit. Ingall says that if the war ended tomorrow, extracting lithium would be the priority. But around half the country's deposits are currently in Russian hands, and Moscow's forces are just a few miles away from another huge deposit, Reuters reports. Kremlin spokespeople and pro-Moscow bloggers, however, claim that the US is the one trying to grab resources. "The minerals of Ukraine belong to the Russian people and nobody else," blogger Starshe Eddy told his 600,000 followers on Telegram this week.

(More Russia-Ukraine war stories.)