Experts say proposed deal with U.S. makes no sense
“If you want critical minerals, Ukraine ain’t the place to look for them,” declares Jack Lifton, executive chairman of the Critical Minerals Institute. “It’s a fantasy. There’s no point to any of this. There’s some other agenda going on here. I can’t believe that anybody in Washington actually believes that it makes sense to get rare earths in Ukraine.”
I think it’s a trap. Zelenskiy knows that the rare earths are difficult to mine profitably. If he had signed it, it would just give Trump cover to claim that Ukraine was not holding up its end of the deal in a few years, and withdraw from whatever agreement was made.
Zelenskiy knows it’s only a matter of time before US support for Ukraine goes away. His job is to push whatever levers he has to keep the support flowing for as long as possible, while arranging more support from Europe.
“A few years from now” is longer than “last week”, so if that was his goal he didn’t do a great job.
Or maybe as the leader of a sovereign country he wasn’t willing to sign a deal where he gave something and got nothing in return (security guarantees).
I could see the whole thing being about withdrawing support from Ukraine because the “deal” fell through. Maybe it was always a means to get to where we are now, with the US no longer supplying information and weapons to Ukraine.