A deal giving the United States access to Ukraine’s critical and rare-earth minerals is “at the 99 yard line with one inch to go,” a senior administration official engaged in the negotiations told NBC News.
According to reports in the Financial Times and elsewhere, the reported agreement appeared to involve concessions on both sides.
Ukraine has not received the security guarantees it urgently wants to help it defeat Russian forces; but the U.S. has not been given $500 billion in potential revenue that it desired from Kyiv’s deposits, the Financial Times reported Tuesday evening.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office did not respond to requests to confirm the news. His office said he was due to hold a press conference around 6:30 a.m. ET.
Signs of a settlement between Washington and Kyiv come after a week of deteriorating relations between the two countries. President Donald Trump provoked outrage in Ukraine and Europe by suggesting a deal that would effectively use Ukraine’s mineral wealth to pay back the U.S. for military aid delivered during the war.
That was rejected outright by Zelenskyy, who Trump in turn called a “dictator.” Meanwhile, Trump has repeated the false claim that Ukraine was responsible for being invaded by Russia.
On Tuesday, Trump confirmed Zelenskyy was visiting Washington on Friday.
“Yeah, I hear that,” he said in the Oval Office. “I hear that he’s coming on Friday.”
Trump has repeatedly criticized the multibillion-dollar assistance given to Kyiv under then-President Joe Biden. He says these costs should be underwritten by European powers, on whose doorstep the conflict sits.
Trump said he would be able to resolve within 24 hours Russia’s three-year-old full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He and his aides since extended this timeline to six months. The senior administration official said Tuesday that a peace deal was 30-60 days away from completion, without elaborating on how this ambitious timeline would be achieved.
It was not clear what Ukraine would receive in the new draft agreement by way of American military support, but officials have suggested that “the minerals agreement is only part of the picture,” Olha Stefanishyna, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister and justice minister who has led the negotiations, told the Financial Times.
Ukraine has for months supported the idea of giving Trump access to its wealth of critical and rare earth elements, which are used for everything from green technology to modern weaponry. Zelenskyy hoped this would incentivize the White House to continue supporting Kyiv with military aid, something Trump has questioned in the past.
In a likely appeal to Trump’s transactional deal-maker spirit, Russia simultaneously proposed an agreement under which the U.S. would gain some ownership of rare-earth minerals and other valuable metals in parts of Ukraine controlled by the Russian military, according to two American officials familiar with intelligence on the matter and another person briefed on the proposal.
Matthew Bodner contributed.
