US President Donald Trump warned his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday, March 30, against “backing out” of Kyiv’s minerals deal with Washington. “He’s trying to back out of the rare earth deal and if he does that he’s got some problems, big, big problems,” Trump told reporters while onboard Air Force One.
“We made a deal on rare earths,” the US President added, “and now he’s saying, ‘well, you know, I want to renegotiate the deal.’ He wants to be a member of NATO, but he’s never going to be a member of NATO. He understands that.” On Friday, Zelensky stated that Ukraine would not accept a minerals agreement that would jeopardise its accession to the EU.
“Nothing that could endanger […] Ukraine’s accession to the EU can be accepted,” he said at a press conference in Kyiv. This was backed up by Ukrainian Foreign Minister, Andrii Sybiha, who said that the country would never accept anything that would make the country weak.
“We can see this Russian strategy and will never accept anything that leaves Ukraine weak or defenceless,” Sybiha said in a post on X. “To the contrary, a real and fair peace requires strong and long-term security guarantees to preserve it.”
The new comments come shortly after Washington unveiled its latest minerals offer to Kyiv. These would grant the United States access to Ukraine’s oil, gas and minerals through a joint investment fund that would split the revenue between the two countries.
According to Ukrainian media, Zelensky said that the latest draft of the deal included “many new provisions that were not previously discussed,” as well as “some aspects that had already been rejected by both sides”.
Ukraine is set to ask for changes in the deal that will commit the US to more investment as well as for further clarifications on how the joint reconstruction fund would work, Bloomberg reported last week.
The two countries were originally set to sign a minerals deal at the end of February, but the deal fell through following a public spat at the White House, during which Vice President J.D. Vance accused Zelensky of being ungrateful.
Meanwhile, Russian state media has reported that Moscow and Washington are also in the midst of discussing their own rare earth minerals deal.
“Rare earth metals are an important area for cooperation, and we have certainly started discussions about various rare earth metals and projects in Russia,” Putin’s envoy on international economic and investment cooperation, Kirill Dmitriev, told Izvestia.