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The minerals deal made no sense.

1. If you wanted minerals because of strategic concerns, you would not source them from a State which has been invaded by Russia. This is not a stable, reliable source.

2. The deal we saw details for was a jointly controlled fund for investment, where 50% of profit of State owned mining and related infrastructure would be deposited. There's no mention there of mineral supply to the US.

I did not understand it, and I still see no sense in it.

What was actually going on?

We saw Donald try to bounce Z into signing : "you have one hour to sign this".

That obviously shattered any trust that might have been there.

I don't think we ever saw the text of that first deal.

Then the second deal was just this jointly controlled investment fund, which looked like a face-saver.

In any event, USA is now out of the game.

A coup is in the process of occurring, and once the judges and courts are subverted, will be complete.

All this with the deal and D and Z is basically water under the bridge; EU has to stand on its own two feet now, and that's the situation here and now, however we got here.

The mineral deal has at least three purposes[0]:

1. It provides a way for Ukraine to become a client of US defense instead of a an aid recipient. That is, it allows Ukraine to pay for the weapons it receives.

2. It puts Americans on the ground in Ukraine in a non-military capacity. This introduces a new diplomatic dimension, as attacking or occupying land with significant American presence is not desirable.

3. It provides money for an investment fund for rebuilding Ukraine.

Whether this is an effective strategy, I don't know.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/02/27/minerals-...

> 1. It provides a way for Ukraine to become a client of US defense instead of a an aid recipient. That is, it allows Ukraine to pay for the weapons it receives.

The text I saw was for the formation of a jointly (US/UA) owned entity which would decide how to reinvest 50% of the profits from UA State owned minerals/related infrastructure.

Unless "reinvest" means "give to US", I don't see this point happening.

> 2. It puts Americans on the ground in Ukraine in a non-military capacity. This introduces a new diplomatic dimension, as attacking or occupying land with significant American presence is not desirable.

In what way? we're not talking about any US State investment, and any US private investment would be crazy, given the war and possibility of future war. No one would invest there.

> 3. It provides money for an investment fund for rebuilding Ukraine.

It's money that exists anyway, only now it's in a fund jointly controlled by US/UA rather than being controlled only by UA.

> reinvest 50% of the profits from UA State owned minerals/related infrastructure.

Small correction: 50% of Ukraine's government revenue from natural resource extraction (minus some expenses).

> Unless "reinvest" means "give to US", I don't see this point happening.

You're right. There may be some options when the fund is actually formed, but the current deal almost exclusively benefits Ukraine (financially).

> In what way? we're not talking about any US State investment

It's up to the US how much they want to invest. If they put a lot of money into the fund, they get a lot of control over how Ukraine starts rebuilding. But due to how the fund is financed, the US will be bought out in the long run and the fund will turn into a Ukrainian sovereign one.

> It's money that exists anyway, only now it's in a fund jointly controlled by US/UA rather than being controlled only by UA.

The idea probably being to allow US oversight. Ukraine is incredibly corrupt and its government is fighting a loosing battle against this.

If a corrupt construction contracter pockets 80% of the money given to him and Ukraine tries to prosecute him, he'll just move to Portugal and nothing is ever going to happen to him.

On the other hand, if the US files charges, that contractor is going to have a really bad time.

Combined with the much superior talent pool in finance and international business available in the US, a lot more money should find its way to its intended purposes.

> Ukraine is incredibly corrupt and its government is fighting a loosing battle against this.

I hear this of this. I lived there for a year, fairly recently, in Kyiv. I didn't particularly see it, hear of it, or encounter it. I remember one or two stories of people being convicted of taking bribes, that's it. I didn't see it around me, or hear it from locals.

I may be completely wrong, but I think this isn't any more of an issue than any other post-Soviet country, and with the war on, UA doing an awful lot now to sort it out, because it relates to survival.

US gets to decide how at least half the fund gets spent, so it's US businesses who get the investment and eventually reap the profits. Ukraine obviously doesn't have the cash to give back and it will never have any without reconstruction. This is one way US gets anything at all back at a pace it has any control over.

But you are correct that without security guarantees there will be no development, no reconstruction, no investments. The deal just does nothing.

> US gets to decide how at least half the fund gets spent

I may be wrong, but I understand it was "joint control", not "50% in USA".

why does the reason the Americans put boots on the ground as a tripwire change the logic on escalating vs backing down?

You can no longer trust the Washington Post as a reliable source of opinions, like those that you're trying to shill as facts.

I think there's two (perhaps more) possibilities you've overlooked, that may go some way to explaining this.

First, that Donald is not the master negotiator / business genius he claims, and is not open to taking advice from smarter people.

Second, misdirection. It may be something to draw attention - the whole 'who needs batteries for their car company?' thing - or it might be a decoy offer, never intended to be seriously contemplated, but will serve as an easy-for-the-dumbs-to-understand future-date hand-wavey explanation for why negotiations failed. (This seems more palatable if you already believe the current US administration is compromised.)

Third, if US owns the resources and Russia tries to seize it, US would have legit reason to send their troops to Ukraine.

The US has legal reasons now. Ukraine is a sovereign country and would be more than happy to accept US military bases. The US hasn't sent soldiers because they don't want to go to war with Russia

Why would US get involved now when they have nothing to gain and possibly escalate the situation to WW3?

If US owned resources in Ukraine, they have very good reason to deploy troops over there. Russia won't escalate the situation by attacking american resources and troop. This should slow down the war to a good extent combined with the cease fire agreements.

Your logic doesn't make sense. Why would Russia be willing to escalate to ww3 in the first scenario but back down in the second scenario?

And if getting involved will escalate to ww3, what difference does those resource deals make? Either american involvement (via NATO or this mineral deal logic) forces Russia to back down or it doesn't.

Presumably, if US already has all of the minerals it needs, the minerals' deal is going to do as much good as is current status quo.

After all, why would the US get involved when they don't need the minerals they'd have to lose?

US signed memorandum of security for Ukraine. Not involving into Ukraine war means: 1. Nuke is the only option to guarantee security. Everyone should get one. Iran, Venezuela etc. 2. If you have nukes you can occupy neighbors with little/no punishment. Taiwan is the next in line. 3. US is not an ally, could not be trusted in any way.

Sad to see how Trump is dismantling USA from it's role as a global superpower.

1. Nuke doesn't guarantee anything in current situation. Russia might blow up the nuke moment it arrives in Ukr.

2. US France UK has made it very clear that they can occupy and establish military bases in non nuclear countries without repercussions, especially in Middle East and Africa.

3. Memorandum was signed by multiple nuclear countries and none of thier troops are deployed in Ukraine. Besides US was the largest supplier of weapons in Ukraine.

US is hardly affected by Ukr situation. For them to get involved, there should be something at stake. If they owned something in Ukr, they would have reason to defend it with US troops. Russia won't escalate by attacking US troops or resources.

> First, that Donald is not the master negotiator / business genius he claims

We're talking about someone who appears to believe a trade deficit means you're somehow being screwed or getting the short end of a deal. That's mercantilistic nonsense. It's economical thinking on par with a child who believes Scrooge McDuck is a good capitalist.

I think it's likely they know Putin will not honor any peace deal. So they have to figure out a way to blow up this deal and blame it on Ukraine or they'll end up with egg on their face.

There is one way in which it could make sense. If the US is able to extract economic benefits from Ukrainian territory, then it is likely to help Ukraine defend that territory in order to get those benefits.

Now whether those benefits are lucrative enough to warrant the US' help, I think not, which is why the deal apparently included no guarantees. The $500 billion is completely bullshit - they're not worth that much.

I would be extremely surprised if the other half of this profit fund was not eventually meant to go into Trump's pockets rather than to the United States itself.

I think they realized this, and the only way Trump and JD Vance & team knew how to backtrack on it, was to behave like bullies and freeze Zelensky out. Since they are well known to be bullies already (but not always), this came sort of naturally.

"Fact check: 33 times Zelensky thanked Americans and US leaders" - https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/28/politics/volodymyr-zelens...

>What was actually going on?

I really hope that Zelensky doesn't arrive back home with a bad case of novichok or polonium.

It's a miracle he's survived all these years.

I'm not convinced Russia actually wants him dead. They are doing fine with him there, and he has not done well at gathering support internationally.

EU and USA have provided immense support for UA, about 250 billion USD in total IIRC.

On the face of it, it's not obvious that he's doing a bad job.

This is a puppet government of the US that was installed in 2014 after they overthrew a Russian puppet government. Of course the previous US administration gave tons of support - Obama's people installed Zelensky, so Biden continuing the support makes sense. Biden's family has also made a lot of money in Ukraine under the current regime, so it was personal for him. As for Europe, this is existential for them and it's cheaper to spend Ukrainian lives on this than their own. What is missing is any other international support from parties who aren't directly interested in this conflict, like India pressuring China to stop supporting Russia.

This is nuts.

Where is it wrong, though? Here are a few pointers:

Ukraine was Victoria Nuland's project. Her CIA had a huge hand in the protests against Yanakovich (who was, in turn, an asset of Putin's GRU), and she personally had a hand in negotiating with Yanakovich on behalf of the protestors. You should read about the events in Ukraine in 2014. That overthrow led to the retaliatory capture of Crimea, where the US and EU apparently did not learn their lesson about how much of a madman Putin is.

As for the Biden Ukraine connection, I'm sure Hunter Biden is just secretly very talented at managing oil companies, which is why he was put on the board of Burisma in 2014, after Nuland's little coup. I believe the "10% for the big guy" quote was in reference to this deal, too.

As for this being an existential threat to Europe, I'm not even sure you need to be given the facts about having a madman like Putin edging closer to your borders, while also depending on him for energy.

Finally, on supporting your puppet governments: it's basic game theory that you should do this. Otherwise all the other ones (see much of Latin America) get overthrown.

[flagged]

You've been breaking the site guidelines badly in this thread, such as here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43222575, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43221102.

There are other recent cases too (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43163494), and it unfortunately goes back a long time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33227833 (Oct 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29522959 (Dec 2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28979071 (Oct 2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16017108 (Dec 2017)

I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on, that would be good.

Among other things, that means no more personal attacks regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.

Sorry dang. I'll dial it back.

Appreciated!

He might develop a bad case of Azov Battalion.

I've seen speculation that rare earth mining is environmentally destructive enough that it faces massive (expensive) regulatory hurdles in the US. Much easier to pay politicians in less developed countries to do it there.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/china-wrestles-with-the-toxic...

Mountain Pass, one bankruptcy back, beat that problem. It took some new technology. The system is closer to closed-loop, rather than using huge amounts of water and producing huge amounts of sludge in evaporation ponds. That's what the mines in China do, and the sludge ponds are visible from orbit.

Here's the Sierra Club report from 2011.[1] They were OK with the mine. So was the state of California and the US EPA. Problem solved.

Then in 2015, after all this was working, China cut the price of rare earths.[2] Mountain Pass mine shut down, and Molycorp, the owner, went bankrupt. But the equipment was stored and maintained. When the price of rare earths from China went back up the next owner, MP Minerals, bought the assets and restarted operations.

This time, the new buyers made long-term deals with the US DoD and General Motors to guarantee a market at a price at which they could operate. That seems to be working.

Much news coverage of mineral issues tends to lack background. Better info is available, but it's on mining industry sites, in USGS reports, and in places most people don't read. Punditry is cheap. Reporting is expensive.

[1] https://www.desertreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/DR_S...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/timtreadgold/2015/05/15/chinese...

One reason they're running roughshod over the EPA, among other agencies.

if there's one thing we can be sure of with the current administration, it's that regulatory hurdles aren't going to stop them doing what they want

Companies still have to follow state and local laws.

Not sure why you're counting Canadian uranium deposits on the American balance sheet.

So far at least, these are under our own control and we still have the free will to decide how they are traded.

Unless the new regime in the US really wants to show its true hand, I guess.

Maybe we can toss a 25% export tariff on them, since the US is trying to strangle our economy anyways.

Titanium is an odd duck here IMO. Titanium is abundant in the Earth’s crust, and titanium ore is fairly inexpensive. We use the ore for all kinds of unglamorous things, e.g. paint. The hard part is turning that ore into nice pieces of metal —- the process is complicated and expensive. While China produces an outsized share of titanium ore, the US has some large-scale operations that turn titanium ore into metal. As far as I know, the only real limit on our domestic production is demand, and demand is limited because the prices are far too high for most applications.

I recall various sources saying that we’re just about to have a revolution in titanium processing, kind of like how aluminum went from being more expensive than gold to being cheap. It hasn’t happened yet, and I wish Iperion luck!

I’ve heard many, many times that one of the biggest problems with nuclear power plants today is simply sourcing fuel. Obviously a large part of that would be due to international scrutiny and security laws, not to mention trustworthy employees to hold up all of this, but I was seriously under the impression that actually GETTING it is the difficult part.

Is that not a supply issue? I admit I only know a bit about the topic, but it’s the only one without a linked source.

The US seems to have only one uranium enrichment facility left - URENCO, in New Mexico.[1] Uranium mining as a US industry is down to 340 people.[2] That used to be a much larger US industry. It's not lack of ore. It's low prices.[3]

[1] https://www.nrc.gov/info-finder/materials/index.html

[2] https://www.eia.gov/uranium/production/annual/

[3] https://nuclearinsider.com/reviving-the-atom-charting-the-co...

Ah, this makes a lot of sense and is resonating with what I remember, thanks!

The problem is that western nuclear tech isn't very vertically integrated.

If you buy a Russian nuclear power plant, Rosatom takes care of absolutely everything.

If you buy a powerplant from anywhere else, you've got to juggle hundreds of various contractors and companies at various stages.

So if you've built your system, there will be only very few fuel suppliers left, whose fuel product is approved for usage with all the components.

And if one of those suppliers has problems or goes bankrupt (since nuclear fuel is an aweful product to make money with: Very low numbers, extremely strict regulations, very expensive handling and processing, a very unstable and slow growing market, constantly new requirements and all of your customers have huge legal teams and deep pockets), you're going to have a lot of difficulty finding a replacement.

France has a vertical integration too. https://www.framatome.com/en/

Westing House and Hitachi to some degree, too.

Well, either I'm outdated or just plain dumb.

Over the years I have amassed solid evidence that it might be the latter, tho.

You're right, but for Trump, there doesn't have to be an actual deal, there just has to be the _appearance_ of a deal. He just needs to be able to repeat that $500 billion number -- it doesn't matter whether it's realistic or not or will ever happen or not. It's like Mexico paying for the wall.

Maybe Trump isn't actually working for Russia/China, and is just waiting for the people of the US to start a gofundme to buy him off so he goes away.

That was the $Trump coin.

If the guy were grateful for anything that was just given to him, he'd be a much different person. Rather it's got to be an explicit "deal" that can feed his ego. "I did such a great job..... Such a great job they just gave me 5 billion dollars and said they'd give me tar and feathers to come back...... yuge..... yuge amount of money..... Just the most"

Thanks for the detailed report, but if you watch the VP debate, it’s clear that Trump’s entire economic campaign platform was based on promising to do stuff that Biden already accomplished, and to lie and claim it hadn’t been done.

Trump also claimed he had no intention of implementing Project 2025, but that’s what he’s doing.

I’m not sure what the correct response is, but anyone that doesn’t think Trump constantly lies is willfully ignorant.

The only explanation I can come up with for this administration’s actions is intentional sabotage of the US economy and democracy. It matches 100% of the actions they have taken so far.

Where can one reliably learn about rare earths in the supply chain, refining abilities, what’s actually important for which tech, etc? I feel like I read very different views on this stuff all the time at different levels of granularity.

You can aspire to control minerals because you need them, or you can aspire to control minerals because you don't want others to have them.

>Titanium ore has supposedly been discovered in [...]

Titanium is very common (ninth most common crustal element IIRC). Generally there are always deposits. It's more important to have the infrastructure already in place because it's obtained in such large quantities.

Also Titanium is an awful metal to work with.

Steel has the nice property of turning into any product with but a stern look, titanium torches your factory down if it doesn't like the air quality during its massage sessions.

I thought I remembered reading that Ukraine was the largest source of neon gas in the world and that it was necessary for lasers that make advanced microchips?

Remember reading that sometime on here when the war started I think.

look up Ingas and Cryoin

Thank you for that. I just got around to looking it up and that definitely explains it.

I wonder if there's a carry on effect of advocating for domestic steel production to get that benefit without drawing a lot of attention to it?

> On the minerals front, the US doesn't need anything from Ukraine.

Need's got nothing to do with it. Bullies don't take what you have because they need it, they take it because that's what you have, and they want to take it away from you, just to be taking it away from you.

For Trump, it is not enough that (as he perceives the situation) he wins, rather than (as he perceives) everyone else loses. Even people's whose backs are up against the wall. Especially people whose backs are up against the wall. If you don't exploit the weakest player at the table, why are you even playing?

(Not that Trump knows anything about gambling... who the fuck loses money running a casino... on multiple separate occasions...)

Trump isn't making deals based on carefully considered advantages and concessions. He's just grasping his tiny hands at whatever comes in reach, whether or not he needs it, like the half-wit schoolyard thug he is.

I dont understand how anyone is not seeing that trump just want to gobble up parts of Ukraine for his own gain, it's no better than the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Trump is just angry he's late to the party. There will be no guarantees for Ukraine and no concessions for Russia once this deal is signed.

> Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact

Germany, not Russia, broke that one.

Worth watching: Neville Chamberlain's famous "Peace for our time" speech. "I have here a paper signed by the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler."[1] And the crowd cheers.

Trump signing a comparable agreement with Putin is all too possible.

[1] https://youtu.be/_gGppFLNaio?t=44

> Germany, not Russia, broke that one.

It was about mutual occupation of Poland. Now Trump is talking with putin how they want to divide Ukraine.

Maybe they don't have strategic minerals, but they do have strategic democracy.

Perhaps this is really about keeping out potential European car battery manufacturers from sourcing their raw materials from Ukraine in the future. Trump is under the influence of Musk after all.

Despite being sold as the "mineral deal" to the public, it has nearly nothing to do with them and doesn't give the US any significant control over them.

It's all about establishing a semi-sovereign fund for Ukraine (slowly turning fully sovereign, due to how it's financed), focused on reconstructing Ukraine.

Note that there's an actual chance Trump will be so narcisstic to make the US lose its alliance with Canada over some rumor he heard on X which has no basis in any of the statistics, and Canada can now join the EU because of its shared border with Denmark.

The Trump administration doesn't give a single shit about truth, it's always about power grabs for them. If I were you I'd digitize any copy of school books I can find on the internet, because they will be gone very soon.

As a Canadian that EU join comment is laughable. We've had a border with France way longer... We aren't getting into the EU on some silly Island no one cares about border... Don't undermine yourself with such silly nonsense

That's not the point. The point is making Ukraine pay off the defense contractors rather than the American taxpayers. Trump made a campaign promise to end the war, and was overwhelmingly reelected on those promises, and has so far kept them.

The "minerals deal" isn't one but in name, no idea why it's being sold as such.

It's really just a Ukrainian sovereign reconstruction fund, with the option for the US to buy its way in. Also the fund is financed through Ukraine's natural resource extraction.

The crux being:

No one else can buy into the fund. So if Ukraine is rebuilt and then disappears from the map, the US pretty much owns the fund, together with whoever is recognized as Ukraine's exile government, and with it a huge portion of Ukraine's industries.

So even if Russia were to take over Ukraine, all the money making stuff is still co-managed by the fund.

And since Ukraine is the exclusive financial benefactor of the fund, whoever takes over Ukraine ends up facing an exile government with an utterly ridiculous budget.

And if they wanted to just expropriate the fund, they'd have to expropriate the US gov, too. Good luck with that.

.

The fund is a REALLY good idea, but the way it's sold to the public and Ukraine refusing to agree to it is ... odd at best.