The intense interest of President Trump for Ukraine minerals seemed to come from suddenly.
He sent his Treasury Secretary to Kiev this month to negotiate with the leader of Ukraine, so he started to publicly increase the pressure in what seemed critical as a Don Mafia extortion program.
“I want the safety of the rare lands,” he said.
But the critical minerals have been in the mind of Mr. Trump at least since 2017, when he signed an executive order on them during his first term. They also attracted the attention of President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
And the recent comments of Mr. Trump on Ukraine resources were not the first time in his new mandate who mentioned the mineral control of a country.
The president spoke of the acquisition of minerals in Greenland and Canada. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau from Canada told a group of entrepreneurs that Mr. Trump’s attention on Canada’s minerals meant that his threats to annex the country were “a real thing”.
Home The mineral wealth abroad has become a foreign policy goal by Mr. Trump and an impulse for his most imperialistic observations since they entered office. His instinct returns to the units of the fallen imperials, when the extraction of the resources motivated the sovereigns to expand the territory.
On Tuesday, after almost two weeks of difficult interviews, Ukrainian and American officials said they had reached an agreement on a framework for sharing revenue from the critical minerals of Ukraine.
Critical minerals are non -food substances that are essential for energy technologies and high risk of interruption of the supply chain, according to the United States Department of Energy. They are found throughout the world to which in Chile and Argentina, the Tibetan plateau controlled by the Chinese and the Democratic Republic of the Congo-E are an integral part of common (batteries for electric cars) and specialized (missile systems). In 2022, the US Geological Survey published a list of 50 critical minerals ranging from aluminum to zirconium.
Due to competition with China, the search for critical minerals was important for the United States for almost a decade.
During the last trip abroad of his presidency, Biden visited a railway supported by the United States in Angola who would help transport critical minerals from central Africa to the coast for export.
The officials of the State Department of his Administration have previously created a group of allied nations to discuss to create or strengthen critical mineral supply chains outside China. And they established a twin forum so that the countries rich in minerals could speak with potential client nations and foreign companies on the development of mines and processing systems.
Ukraine, Greenland and Canada were part of it. In fact, Ukraine and the United States approached an agreement last autumn in which Ukraine would have promised to give the United States a garment to potential projects, allowing American companies or those of the allied nations sufficient delivery times to make offers for contracts. The State Department would also have given technical assistance to Ukraine to mapping and writing.
It was not the approach of Mr. Trump.
“Trump and his helpers are talking in a useless way,” said Jose W. Fernandez, who was an architect of the initiatives of the State Department on critical minerals in the Biden Administration. “These are countries that want investments. But they want partnerships. They are not looking for a colonial relationship. “
He added that these countries were attracted to American financial and commercial partners because they no longer liked coercive options, including China’s proposals.
Last September, the president Volodymyr Zelensky from Ukraine began to present a “victory plan” against Russia to allied governments and to Mr. Trump, who was in the candidacy for the president, who, among other things, offered partnerships on critical minerals.
Fernandez was supposed to sign a memorandum of understanding last October with a deputy prime minister of Ukraine, Yulia Svyrydenko, said the State Department in one and -mail sent to journalists at that moment. But on October 29, the day of the scheduled signature did not show up in Washington.
Mrs. Svyrydenko should have signed the agreement in a Ukrainian reconstruction conference in Warsaw on November 13, but again did not appear.
At that point Trump had won the Ukrainian elections and officials told the United States diplomats who preferred to wait to sign an agreement with the administration on the way, according to two former US officials and a Ukrainian official with knowledge of the events.
Ukrainian officials had already talked to some foreign businessmen, including Ronald S. Lauder, a cosmetic heir who is a friend of Mr. Trump, on investment opportunities in the Ukrainian mineral sector.
At the beginning of this month, Mr. Zelensky opposed the terms in which Scott Besent, the secretary of the treasure, presented him to Kiev. The proposal has requested Ukraine to give the United States half of its revenues from natural resources, including minerals, gas and oil, as well as gains from ports and other infrastructures.
Trump initially also requested $ 500 billion for the United States. He said that America deserved payment for billions of weapons and budget aid that it gave Ukraine during the Biden administration, even if the amount was a small part of the United States’s annual federal expenditure. Critics defined the terms birds of prey, colonialists and mercantilists of Mr. Trump.
US officials have tempered some of the requests by continuing to press pressure on Mrs. Svyrydenko and other Ukrainian negotiators to sign an agreement. The current framework project has a vague reference to the security guarantees for Ukraine, that Mr. Zelensky said that they are essential to prevent Russia from trying to launch another invasion after any future ceased to end the war. Trump said on Wednesday that he has no intention of giving a lot of a guarantee.
“Many countries consider their natural resources as central to national sovereignty and the potential for economic development,” said Abigail Hunter, executive director of the Center for Critical Minerals Strategy near Safe, a group of energy security research. “This makes negotiations on highly sensitive critical minerals, with the warnings wary of control or foreign exploitation”.
China has been in a thrust of years to develop global domain in the extraction and processing of critical minerals. At the same time, the United States had to import significant quantities of critical minerals for commercial and military use.
A report published this month from the Center for Strategic and International Studies observed that the United States import from 50 to 100 percent of each of the 50 of the 50 critical minerals listed by the US Geological Survey. China is the best manufacturer for 29 of minerals.
And “China has repeatedly demonstrated its will to arm these minerals”, says the report, including the imposing export checks and prohibitions in the last two years on a series of raw minerals. In addition, he said, China now hastens between 40 and 90 percent of the supply of rare, graphite, lithium, cobalt and copper elements.
The executive order Mr. Trump signed in 2017 was intended to “guarantee safe and reliable supplies” of critical minerals. The text ordered the interior secretary to publish a list, pushing the geological investigation of the United States to publish an evaluation in 2018 and again four years later.
Some foreign leaders have tried to work this point of view. Ashraf Ghani, then president of Afghanistan, promoted the mineral wealth of his country to Mr. Trump so that the American president kept US troops in the nation, while the government fought a Taliban insurrection. Mr. Ghani’s offer failed.
But the minerals remained in the mind of Mr. Trump.
In September 2020, an executive order signed that pushed the agencies to face the “undue entrusting” of the country on “foreign opponents” for critical minerals, that is to say China.
The interruptions of the global supply chains during the Pandemia del Coronavirus have increased the anxieties within the government of the United States. Biden issued an executive order at the beginning of 2021 which, among other things, told the secretary to defense to identify the risks for the flow of critical minerals from abroad.
The following year, Fernandez, then the highest economic official at the State Department, supervised the creation of the Minerals Security Partnership Agency, a group of 15 nations trying to expand global supply chains for critical minerals. The White House of Trump and the Indian government mentioned that group in a joint declaration when Trump met this month with Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, saying that their nations, both members of the group, could collaborate in critical minerals.
Last year, the State Department created a twin forum with 15 nations of producers, including Ukraine and Greenland, looking for investors to help grow their industries.
“The bottom line is that Ukraine pursues investments for a long time,” said Fernandez.
So has Greenland.
The forum held a meeting in November in Nuk, Greenland, where companies presented seven projects in the country at about 100 potential investors who called for video.
In his first term, Mr. Trump was set on the idea of buying Greenland after Mr. Lauder’s staid, the heir of the cosmetics.
Another ally of Trump Business, Howard Lutnick, the secretary of the president, has links with a mining project in Greenland, through an investment made by his company, Cantor Fitzgerald, in a company based in New York called Critical Metals Corp., according to Farmberries examined by the New York Times.
Some best Trump assistants were watching the strategic dilemma involving China and critical minerals even before the start of this administration.
Last July, Marco Rubio, then Senator representing Florida, forced a bill to face the question. After becoming the secretary of state last month, he wrote in a cable that the “energy domain” would be a priority. It is unlikely that Mr. Rubio and other Trump officials will talk about using minerals to help face the climatic crisis or accelerate a transition of clean energy, which Biden’s assistants had done.
During a visit to the Dominican Republic of this month, Rubio spoke of the potential for the minerals of the country’s rare lands to be used for weapons and other advanced technologies.
“Having an ally with access to these elements in the hemisphere is very good,” he said. “We want to help develop this wealth of the Dominican Republic”.
Constant meheut Reports contributed by Kyiv e Michael Crowley from Washington.