Although there was no guarantee to defend Ukraine, the deal means that any future attack against Ukraine will also be an attack against American interests.
|
Listen To This Story
 |
Washington and Kyiv’s decision to ink a long-awaited deal that gives the US preferential rights to extract minerals, including rare earths and hydrocarbons, from Ukraine followed weeks of negotiations and ultimatums. The decisive moment occurred at the funeral of Pope Francis on April 26, during the brief meeting at the Vatican between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“What we have is the first result of the Vatican meeting that makes it truly historic,” Zelenskyy announced shortly afterward.
Although the deal involves US investment and involvement only in future mineral extraction projects, it means that the US has a financial stake in seeing that Ukraine survives. Future attacks against Ukraine can also be seen as attacks against American interests, a risky proposition.
The deal also telegraphs the message that as far as obtaining critical supplies of rare earth minerals goes, the US has options other than China. That could turn out to be valuable to Trump in upcoming negotiations with China’s leader, Xi Jinping.
The agreement makes no overt promise of future US military aid, but not long after it was signed, Washington let it be known that additional Patriot anti-missile systems were authorized for Ukraine, including one system that is being transferred from Israel. The expensive systems are the most effective tool to intercept Russian cruise and ballistic missiles, which mostly target civilian sites.
At the same time, Washington signaled its intention to step back from direct involvement in trying to force a peace settlement. It has also made it clear that it does not intend to hurry the peace accord.
“Our style will change,” State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce told reporters after the announcement. “We will not be the mediators… We are not going to fly around the world at the drop of a hat to mediate meetings. Now is the time that [Kyiv and Moscow] need to present and develop concrete ideas about how this conflict is going to end.”
A Kyiv-based analyst, Igar Tyshkevych, agreed that securing the rare earth minerals accord without having to become directly involved in negotiating a Russian ceasefire, constitutes a diplomatic victory of sorts for Trump ahead of his summit with Xi.
The Russia-Ukraine war is likely to be discussed among other, larger issues such as the tariffs war and the future of Taiwan. Now Trump “can wait,” Tyshkevych told WhoWhatWhy.
While Russia is amassing manpower and arms to seize more Ukrainian territory during the summer campaign, it is likely that Moscow will go for a peace deal only if Ukraine “capitulates fully or partially,” Tyshkevych said. He thinks that that is not likely to happen.
There was growing concern throughout Ukraine that Trump was far more interested in currying favor with Vladimir Putin than he was in stopping Russia’s murderous missile and drone attacks against Ukraine.
Ukraine has enough stamina and resources to keep fighting, while Trump has nothing to gain by acting as a middleman in a conflict that is not likely to be resolved right away. As Tyshkevych sees it, Trump is better off waiting to see what develops. “A proposal on a peace settlement in Ukraine will develop accordingly,” he concluded.
The rare-earth deal and improved relations between Kyiv and Washington have come just in time. There was growing concern throughout Ukraine that Trump was far more interested in currying favor with Vladimir Putin than he was in stopping Russia’s murderous missile and drone attacks against Ukraine.
Ordinary citizens were even more incensed when Putin launched a massive missile attack against civilian housing projects in Kyiv despite Trump’s repeated pleas for a ceasefire. The impression was that Trump was not only ignorant about what was taking place but also that he was being played for a sucker by Putin.
Hours after Russian ballistic missiles leveled a two-story apartment building just a few yards away from his own home, Serhei Parkhomenko, a retired 60-year-old telecommunications expert, had some definite views on Trump’s pre-deal policy toward Ukraine.
“This is political prostitution, there’s no other term,” Parkhomenko told WhoWhatWhy. He was standing in a pile of debris that only a short while earlier had been his furniture. The interior of his apartment was shattered by the steel entrance door that the blast from an exploding missile had hurtled through his living room, in the course of demolishing the neighboring apartment block in northern Kyiv.
Parkhomenko blames Trump for taking “sides” with Moscow and thinks that the US president is not concerned by the civilian deaths caused by dozens of Russian cruise and ballistic missiles and hundreds of explosives-laden drones that keep raining hell on Ukraine.
Trump’s supposed plan for stopping Russia’s continued missile attacks against Ukraine has never been made public, and his “final offer,” leaked to the press in mid-April, appeared mostly to benefit Moscow.
The April 25 attack that killed 12 people, most of them Parkhomenko’s next-door neighbors, also wounded at least 87 other people. It was the largest shelling of Kyiv since last July, when a swarm of missiles and drones killed 34 people and reduced part of Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital to a smoking ruin.
Ironically, the April 25 attack occurred on the 96th day of Trump’s second term as president, and it seemed to put the lie to Trump’s repeated boasts that if he had been president when Putin launched his “special military operation,” he would have ended the conflict between Russia and Ukraine in “less than 24 hours.”
Trump’s supposed plan for stopping Russia’s continued missile attacks against Ukraine has never been made public, and his “final offer,” leaked to the press in mid-April, appeared mostly to benefit Moscow. It called for a halt to hostilities without specifying how long the ceasefire would last, and it included a prohibition on Ukraine’s membership in NATO.
It also assumed that Ukraine would accept Washington’s “de jure” recognition of annexed Crimea as part of Russia. In addition, it included what amounted to “de facto” recognition of Moscow’s occupation of large chunks of four eastern and southern regions in Ukraine.
In exchange for a ceasefire of undefined duration and a freeze along the current frontlines, the Kremlin demanded the immediate lifting of all US sanctions slapped on Russia since Crimea’s 2014 annexation.
Despite Trump’s early bravado concerning Ukraine, little or no progress was made and, in the days leading up to the deal concerning Ukraine’s minerals, the White House threatened to walk away from the negotiations altogether if Russia and Ukraine refused to agree to Trump’s terms, which he presented as his “final offer.”
Trump appeared to be banking on Putin’s readiness to halt hostilities in exchange for recognizing Crimea as Russian territory. Putin considers the Black Sea peninsula’s “return to the motherland” the crowning achievement of his rule. Most experts saw little likelihood that Russia would agree to stop fighting when it was slowly gaining ground. It didn’t need to listen to Trump in order to have Crimea; it already possessed it.
Nevertheless, Trump attempted to act as though Russia was getting that chunk of Ukraine because of his intervention.
“Crimea will stay with Russia. And Zelenskyy understands that, and everybody understands that it’s been with [Russia] for a long time,” Trump told Time magazine the day after the April 25th attack against Kyiv.
While several of Trump’s conditions might be open to negotiation, agreeing to Russia’s annexation of Crimea has always been an obstacle that appeared insurmountable.
On April 27, Zelenskyy admitted that “Ukraine doesn’t have enough weaponry to regain control over Crimea.” While not conceding Crimea to Russia, Zelenskyy was making it clear that Ukraine lacked the capacity to recapture Crimea — at least for the time being.
Moscow seemed pleased both by Trump’s obsequiousness and by Zelenskyy’s admission that, for the time being at least, Crimea was beyond Kyiv’s grasp. The only way Russia could be forced to leave Crimea was if the US committed itself to backing Kyiv’s attempts to recapture it, and all sides seemed to agree that, for now at least, that option is off the table.
Trump’s position on Crimea “fully corresponds to our understanding and what we’ve been talking about for a long time,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on April 25.
Since the 2014 annexation, the Kremlin has spent billions of dollars to expand Soviet-era military bases, build new ones, and deploy tens of thousands of servicemen, new warships, diesel submarines, and the advanced SS-400 air missile systems.
All of that, however, has proved vulnerable to strikes by Western-supplied missiles and increasingly effective Ukrainian air and sea drones.
Ukrainian observers see Trump’s earlier proposals as a disaster. “Solving problems at our expense is not just immoral. It’s ineffective,” Kyiv-based analyst Mariya Kucherenko told WhoWhatWhy.
“We have already eaten these ceasefires and Russia’s ‘concessions’ with a big spoon,” she said, referring to a batch of accords inked between Kyiv, Moscow, and Russia-backed separatists in southeastern Ukraine after 2014.
She called Trump-proposed “compromises” unacceptable. “A compromise between what and what? Between Russia’s desire to kill, rape, rob, seize territories — and our demand not to take our territories and not to kill us?” she said.
Her view is shared by most of Ukrainians. While some foreign observers may see Trump’s “final offer” as a feasible compromise, at least 73 percent of Ukrainians view Trump’s actions as “negative,” according to an April 1 poll conducted by the Kyiv Sociology Institute.
Nikolay Mitrokhin — a researcher with Germany’s Bremen University, who has penned dozens of analytical pieces on the war — told WhoWhatWhy: “It’s the best real version of the war’s end for Ukraine if it doesn’t have the forces to win, and, moreover, constantly loses territory to Russia.”
On the other hand, Russia has to consider what’s likely to happen once Trump is out of office. “In theory, the next US presidential administration could cancel Crimea’s de jure recognition,” Mitrokhin added.
