Experts react: At last, the US and Ukraine signed a minerals deal. Here’s what to expect next.
Rock paper signed. After months of getting close only to come up short—including a rocky Oval Office meeting in late February between US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy—the United States and Ukraine quietly struck a much-anticipated economic partnership on Wednesday. The agreement is intended to open US access to Ukraine’s natural resources, including its critical minerals, while helping to finance Ukraine’s reconstruction. What does the partnership entail? Where do Washington and Kyiv stand with each other now? And what message does the deal send to Russia? Below, Atlantic Council experts dig into the details and offer their answers.
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John E. Herbst: This deal gives Trump a concrete interest in Ukraine’s survival
Shelby Magid: Ukraine is now in its strongest position since Trump took office
Matthew Kroenig: The United States now has a stronger stake in the future of Ukraine
Reed Blakemore: Ukraine’s critical minerals deposits will take years to bring to market
Ed Verona: With its unequal and exploitative terms, the deal’s future is uncertain
Doug Klain: The hard-won deal could reopen the door to more US military aid to Ukraine
Suriya Jayanti: Zelenskyy walked a very difficult line but the deal is a success
Andrew D’Anieri: There will be political drama, but expect Ukraine to ratify the deal
Oleh Shamshur: For Ukraine, the signed minerals deal is a major improvement over its earlier drafts
This deal gives Trump a concrete interest in Ukraine’s survival
This is a bad day for Russian President Vladimir Putin. The deal is a plus for US economic and national security policy. One, it is essential for the United States to have friends providing critical minerals. It cannot be dependent on adversaries such as China or Russia for that. So that is a plus. It is also positive for Ukraine, and not just because it now has an investor clearly committed to working on this subject of Ukrainian economic development. More importantly, this deal gives Trump—in terms he understands—concrete interest in Ukraine’s long-term survival as a secure, economically viable state.
The Kremlin will note with unhappiness that this agreement is the first occasion on which the new administration is talking about the provision of additional arms to Ukraine. It is unclear what the economic meaning of this is for the development of Ukrainian rare earths. What is absolutely clear is that, in Article VI of the deal laying out “Contributions to the Partnership,” the Trump administration is broaching for the first time sending arms to Ukraine. Making sure that does not happen has been one of Putin’s principal goals since the new administration took office.
—John E. Herbst is the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and a former US ambassador to Ukraine.
Ukraine is now in its strongest position since Trump took office
With the deal finally signed, Ukrainian officials can breathe an all too rare sigh of relief. Between fighting off a full-scale invasion and navigating a rocky road with Washington through cease-fire proposals, summits, contentious meetings, and a now iconic pull-aside meeting at the funeral of Pope Francis, Ukrainians have put in tremendous effort to close a deal that puts them in their strongest position yet with Washington since Trump took office.
Through intense negotiations, Ukrainian officials showed they could maneuver and persevere to ultimately get a fair deal. While the Trump administration put tremendous pressure on Ukraine to accept earlier deals, Ukraine managed to show that it is not just a junior partner that has to roll over and accept a bad deal. Ukrainian officials put their nation’s future first and managed the serious work to get to a final agreement that can be called a win on both sides.
This success and improvement in the US-Ukraine relationship comes as the Trump administration expresses increasing frustrations with Russia, questioning Putin’s willingness to end the war. Ukraine found itself under major attack shortly after the deal was signed, evidence of Putin’s pique at the agreement. While peace talks slow, the United States partially lifted its pause on military aid for Ukraine, approving the Trump administration’s first fifty million dollars’ worth of arms exports to the country through direct commercial sales.
As US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put it: “This agreement signals clearly to Russia that the Trump Administration is committed to a peace process centered on a free, sovereign, and prosperous Ukraine over the long term.” Such a statement and commitment from Washington now undercuts all of the Kremlin’s aims. With this deal and the administration’s other recent statements, perhaps Putin might realize he once again underestimated Ukraine.
—Shelby Magid is deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.
The United States now has a stronger stake in the future of Ukraine
Trump has said that the critical minerals deal provides a security guarantee for Ukraine. Traditional security experts have doubted whether such an arrangement can replace boots on the ground as an adequate assurance, but it will facilitate increased American investments and presence of US personnel in Ukraine. This will give the United States a strong stake in the future security and stability of the country. Indeed, for a businessman like Trump, this may even be a stronger statement of commitment than troop deployments.
—Matthew Kroenig is vice president and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and the Council’s director of studies.
Ukraine’s critical minerals deposits will take years to bring to market
The fact this deal got over the finish line after weeks of ups and downs speaks to the strategic value of the United States putting a marker down on Ukraine’s future—especially as the Trump administration accelerates efforts to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine.
Whether or not that strategic marker manifests in natural resources is still very unclear, if not unlikely. Though the US-Ukraine deal treats natural resources in a broad sense—including oil and natural gas in addition to critical minerals—access to Ukraine’s mineral resources has remained a consistently animating feature of negotiations. To that end, little of Ukraine’s mineral future has changed since this deal was first put on the table. Many of its critical minerals deposits remain in contested environments that will take years to bring to market, assuming that a negotiated peace keeps those minerals in Ukraine. Post-conflict stability, energy and logistical inputs to make project development successful, as well as the quality and quantity of those mineral resources will all bear strongly on investor appetite to pursue the licenses that are the backbone of this new reconstruction investment fund. If those upstream resources are successfully developed, then a separate but necessary question is how much of the raw material then passes through value chains that bottleneck in China as it becomes finished precursors and components. The answer to that question will determine if this deal supports the de-risking strategy that the Trump administration is deploying on a number of fronts.
To be clear, the United States needs all the below-ground opportunities it can secure given the increasingly stark vulnerabilities it faces regarding China’s control of mineral supply chains. That makes this deal, in broad terms, a positive story. Yet it’s much too soon to characterize this deal as a “win” for supply chain de-risking rather than a useful card in Trump’s negotiations with Putin.
—Reed Blakemore is the director of research and programs at the Atlantic Council Global Energy Center.
With its unequal and exploitative terms, the deal’s future is uncertain
It must come as a relief to the Ukrainians that the United States dropped its insistence on including the cost of all previous financial and military aid on the balance sheet of this deal. Nevertheless, the so-called partnership agreement is so onerous that it is tantamount to picking the pockets of an assault victim. Faced with an invasion by an enemy three times its size, Ukraine had little choice but to acquiesce to terms that reduce it to the status of a virtual colony or risk incurring the enmity of what has been until recently one of its staunchest allies. Under such extenuating circumstances, Zelenskyy bit the bullet and signed off on the deal. However, some nettlesome questions remain.
Will this deal have to be ratified by the Rada, Ukraine’s legislature? The unequal and exploitative terms are not likely to be accepted without opposition from across the Ukrainian political spectrum. Is the deal subject to a “yes or no” vote, or will amendments be considered? If it is ratified by a slim majority, then would potential investors be willing to commit to projects if a future government might abrogate a deal that was arguably imposed under duress?
The history of mineral resources deals offers ample reason to doubt that this one would stand up well over the period typically required to develop large and capital-intensive projects with lead times of up to a decade. Russia, ironically, provides an example of how resource-related deals can come unraveled. Production sharing agreements signed during the difficult transitional period of the 1990s were subsequently repudiated by Putin’s regime, with Western partners forced to surrender control and majority ownership in major projects. There are many more such examples in the developing world. I suspect that few serious US investors will put their shareholders’ money at risk based on such a clearly unbalanced “deal.”
—Ed Verona is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center covering Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, with a particular focus on Ukrainian reconstruction aid.
The hard-won deal could reopen the door to more US military aid to Ukraine
After months of tough negotiations and cease-fires agreed to, Ukraine has given Trump another win. The announcement of an economic partnership between the United States and Ukraine—which started as a deal on access to Ukraine’s minerals but has since morphed into a broader investment fund for Ukraine’s reconstruction—is welcome news for anyone who wants to see Washington step back from the last few months of hostility toward Kyiv.
More than any specifics in this deal, the top takeaway is that while Putin continues to say “no” to Trump’s push for peace, Ukraine has yet again said “yes.”
But the specifics do matter, and Ukraine seems to have pulled off some seriously tough negotiating with the Trump administration. Past proposals from Washington reportedly saw the United States taking partial or total ownership of broad swaths of Ukraine’s natural resources and infrastructure, something that prompted Zelenskyy in February to say, “I’m not going to sign something that ten generations of Ukrainians will be paying for.” Now, Ukraine retains full ownership of its assets and has turned the deal into a joint investment fund toward the country’s future reconstruction, with only future—not past—US assistance to Ukraine counting as a contribution to the fund. It’s a big win indeed after Trump has repeatedly mentioned inflated figures of what Washington has sent to aid Ukraine.
More than anything though, agreeing on a deal may reopen the door to military assistance from the United States to Ukraine. While weapons obligated by the Biden administration continue to flow, Trump has yet to make any new commitments to aid Ukraine’s defense since taking office. Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko, who signed the agreement on Wednesday in Washington, said that in addition to direct financial contributions to the investment fund, new assistance such as air defense systems would be considered an investment in the fund. No country but the United States can provide long-range air defenses against Russia’s ballistic missile strikes on Ukrainian cities.
Trump has spent months searching for a win in Ukraine, and now he’s got one. But Russia’s invasion will not be solved by an economic partnership. Putin has repeatedly rejected cease-fires because he does not want peace—he wants Ukraine. If the White House really hopes to secure a peace deal with Russia, that will require putting meaningful pressure on the Kremlin through the type of new sanctions Congress has prepared and by following through with new military support for Ukraine.
—Doug Klain is a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.
Zelenskyy walked a very difficult line but the deal is a success
Ukraine seems to have managed to negotiate itself out from under a proposed colonial-style resource concession, signing what has evolved into the framework for a deal with the United States that is actually mutually beneficial. Earlier White House drafts of the deal sought de facto US ownership of all Ukraine’s extractive commodities and their supporting infrastructure in perpetuity, with some profit possible for Ukraine after $500 billion in “repayment” to the United States. But the final deal leaves ownership and control with Ukraine, has no such repayment threshold, requires the United States to contribute to the Reconstruction Investment Fund, and other much more balanced terms.
Although Zelenskyy didn’t clinch security guarantees or NATO membership in exchange, the result is a commercial advantage for the United States. It is also a chance at huge foreign investment for Ukraine with the profits kept safe(r) from corruption and thus more likely to actually fund the country’s reconstruction. Ukraine still has work to do to make itself a more attractive country for foreign investment, such as stronger anti-corruption and rule-of-law adherence. But as written, this deal is a big win. Zelenskyy can rightly take credit for walking a very difficult line and coming out successful. It may well buoy him politically and buttress his chances of staying in office, which had been in decline, not least due to the White House’s hostility, which may also have been tempered with this deal. At least as of now, this is a win-win for all involved.
—Suriya Jayanti is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.
There will be political drama, but expect Ukraine to ratify the deal
There’s no doubt that the US-Ukraine natural resources deal is a significant step forward in relations between the Trump and Zelenskyy administrations. After months of will-they or won’t-they speculation that centered on the Trump-Zelenskyy relationship, two of the most competent officials on each side—Bessent and Svyrydenko—got the deal done. Washington gets priority access for US companies to develop new natural resource projects in Ukraine and some solid investment protections to mitigate regulatory and corruption risks. Kyiv did not get security guarantees per se, and the donation of further military aid by the United States would count toward the US contribution to the Investment Fund. But it did secure a 50-50 management partnership over the fund, concessions on only future projects (rather than reach-back clauses that would have included proceeds from existing natural resource operations, previously put forward by the Trump team), and a long-term commitment by the United States to invest in a major piece of Ukraine’s renewal.
On the technical side, expect some opposition lawmakers in the Ukrainian parliament to try to hold up the ratification process. The technocrats and European-minded parties will likely focus on oversight over the deal, while populist parties and Russian influence operations will attempt to paint the deal as Zelenskyy selling Ukraine’s sacred lands to the decadent West. Neither element is likely to matter given that Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People party retains a legislative supermajority and can count on support from a range of independent MPs; the agreement will be ratified sooner rather than later.
For the United States, the agreement provides a new, more high-profile mandate for the Development Finance Corporation (DFC). Indeed, DFC, rather than Bessent’s Treasury Department, will oversee the fund from the US side. DFC, which had focused on providing hundreds of millions in risk insurance and small-scale loan guarantees in Ukraine under the Biden administration, will now be tasked with managing billions of dollars in strategic assets in Ukraine alone. The focus on natural resource development is a welcome broadening of DFC’s mandate and one that could extend to other areas across Eurasia.
—Andrew D’Anieri is a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.
For Ukraine, the deal is a major improvement over its earlier drafts
Judging from the published text of the minerals deal, it seems that the Ukrainian side managed to ensure that the most notorious elements of the last US draft were not included in the agreement’s final version. Most importantly, Ukraine retained control over its mineral wealth and will exercise full influence over the functioning of the reconstruction investment fund. The deal also recognizes Ukraine’s obligations as part of the process of the country’s accession to the European Union (EU). However, this recognition cannot be considered ironclad, as any conflicts that arise between complying with this agreement and Kyiv’s EU accession obligations are subject to consultation and negotiation.
In a notable reversal of some of the Trump team’s previous positions, the deal’s text refers to “Russia’s full-scale invasion,” indicates the possibility of continued US military assistance to Ukraine, and does not consider future revenue from Ukrainian critical minerals projects as repayment for assistance provided to Ukraine by the Biden administration. However, it remains to be seen whether signing this deal will prompt the Trump administration to modify its peace proposal by making it more acceptable for Ukraine. I still have my reservations about that.
—Oleh Shamshur is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and a former Ukrainian ambassador to the United States.
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