What the country has is “scorched earth; what it doesn’t have is rare earths,” columnist Javier Blas has said
Employees wait for an elevator to take them underground to start their shift at a coal mine on February 20, 2024 near Dnepr, Ukraine © Getty Images Ukraine has vastly and deliberately overstated its rare-earth mineral reserves in an attempt to win the favor of US President Donald Trump, Bloomberg columnist and commodities expert Javier Blas suggested in an op-ed released on Wednesday. He warned that Trump’s fixation on a resource extraction deal with Ukraine is an “illusion” and “folly.” The saga of the potential resource deal with the US began in November last year, when Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky presented his ‘victory plan’ for the conflict with Russia. The road map included the prospect for a special agreement with Western countries, including the US, “on the joint protection of critical resources available in Ukraine, joint investment, and subsequent use of the corresponding economic potential.” The offer piqued Trump’s interest, who demanded the “equivalent of $500 billion worth of rare earths” from Ukraine in exchange for US assistance to the embattled nation. However, according to Blas, the narrative about Ukraine brimming with rare-earth resources seems to be based on a hoax. He suggested that the Ukrainians, “desperate to find a way to engage Trump… miscalculated [by] presenting the then-incoming president a ‘victory plan’ in November that talked up – way, way up – the potential of the country’s mineral resources.”
Read more He went on to say that Ukraine “has no significant rare-earth deposits other than small scandium mines,” suggesting that Trump conflated ‘rare-earths’ with the broader category of “critical minerals” – which Ukraine does have, but not to the tune of $500 billion. Blas also remarked that Ukraine once produced significant amounts of iron ore and coal before the conflict, adding that some of the mines are now controlled by Russia. “What Ukraine has is scorched earth; what it doesn’t have is rare earths,” he said. He noted that this is not the first time the US has made this type of mistake, recalling that in 2010, the Pentagon declared Afghanistan to be the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” with the total amount of untapped mineral deposits in the country estimated at $1 trillion. This later turned out to be “a complete fantasy,” he said. Earlier reports suggested that the US and Ukraine discussed a deal under which Washington would be granted 50% ownership of Ukraine’s rare-earth minerals as reimbursement for continued military aid. However, Zelensky reportedly declined to sign an agreement, with several unnamed officials describing it as a “colonial agreement.” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has suggested that the US is trying to take advantage of the Ukrainian leadership’s willingness to “sell the country by auction.”
