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The workers do their work in a granite mine on February 26, 2025 in the Zhytomyr region of Ukraine.
Kostiantyn Liberov | Libkos | Getty images
Ukraine could have changed the course in its difficult relationships with the United States by offering access to the administration of President Donald Trump to his critical minerals as part of the broader peace negotiations, but experts warn that the question signs remain around the value and accessibility of such deposits.
The president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, will travel to Washington on Friday for a possible signature of an agreement with Trump that would see kyiv and the United States. Develop and monetize Ukraine deposits together of rare earths, critical minerals, oil, gas and other natural resources.
Trump previously said that he saw the agreement as compensation for the help of the United States to Ukraine throughout the war with Russia, and He had claimed that the agreement was worth $ 500 billion.
Speaking on Thursday, the president of the United States also said that the economic pact would serve to avoid greater Russian aggression. “We are a support because we will be there, we will work in the country. That is a great economic thing for them,” he said in the Oval office.
The “Marco Agreement” As Ukraine described it On Wednesday, however, he did not mention the figure of $ 500 billion or the largest value of the agreement. Ukraine has already played to the United States such a sum.
That Ukraine has “significant deposits of rare earths”, As the United Nations declaredIt is generally not disputed. The country is considered to be a treasure of rare earth metal deposits such as lithium and cobalt, widely used in rechargeable batteries for electronic devices, as well as Scandio (an aluminum alloy agent), graphite (used in the production of electric vehicles batteries), tantalum (also used in electronic devices) and niobio, which is used to make the steel more light and solid.
“About 5% of all ‘critical raw materials’ in the world are found in Ukraine, which occupies only 0.4 percent of the land surface,” said the Deputy Minister of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources of Ukraine, Svetlana Grinchuk, in 2022.
Analysts say that there are many unanswered questions about the size of the rare deposits of minerals and strategic lands of Ukraine, as well as how accessible they are given the occupation of Russia of a strip of Ukraine and the massive process of reconstruction that the country will face after the war.
They also question the final value of an American-Ukraine agreement given the changing demand for such natural resources.
Nataliia Shapoval, head of the KSE Institute, a group of experts within the kyiv School of Economics, which has compiled a database of the critical minerals of Ukraine, said that President Trump’s demand for deposits worth $ 500 billion was “theoretically possible.”
“I think there will be some alignment with this figure that Trump mentioned,” Shapoval told CNBC through the video call earlier this month. However, he questioned the validity of some of the current valuations of the Soviet era.
“Other estimates are still confidential,” he continued. “There, the numbers are lower and may not be in the billion.”
The not so good
However, it complicates things is the location of the mineral wealth of Ukraine, and most are in large territories occupied by Russian of Luhansk and Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine, as well as in the central area of Dnipropetrovsk, and in the southern and partially Russian area of Zaporizhzhia.
Not only is an active war in those areas, which makes access contingent in the result of the war and any subsequent peace agreement, but also extracted, which makes extraction in the future very difficult.
According to the experts of the Atlantic Council, there has been a lot of rumor about the “rare” minerals of Ukraine, but the country does not have large amounts of rare earth elements, according to experts from the Atlantic Council.
“What is instead are the significant reserves of titanium, graphite and lithium, which are fundamental resources for the United States defense industry and a broader high -tech economy,” Reed Blakemor, director of Research and Programs of the Global Energy Center of the Atlantic Council, commented online on Wednesday.
But access to these minerals, along with other aluminum and hydrocarbons reserves, will depend on the result of the current war, he said.
“A significant part of these resources, both active and subexplored, are found in the eastern third of Ukraine,” Reed said.
A vision of the granite that is extracted on February 26, 2025 in the Zhytomyr region of Ukraine.
Kostiantyn Liberov | Libkos | Getty images
The geopolitical expert Robert Muggah, founder of the consultant The SECDEV Group and a frequent commentator about the critical minerals of Ukraine, said earlier this week that, although Ukraine can be an attractive proposal for investment partners who seek to monetize their critical minerals “actually get it out of the land is a completely different matter.”
“Russia currently occupies more than 60% of Ukrainian coal mines, and a part of cessium, lithium, manganese and rare earth deposits (which) potentially deny the income of Ukraine and deepens the Russian influence between supply chains.” He said in x.
Even after extracting minerals, there will be additional obstacles to overcome.
“China is still the force of the dominant market in refined minerals and processing,” said Reed of the Atlantic Council on Wednesday.
“For an agreement to really eliminate the risk of the US mineral supply chain. UU. Currently, he declared, “the United States lacks infrastructure to transport and refine these minerals in Europe or North America on a scale.”
– Karen Gilchrist of CNBC contributed to this report.
