Minerals deal shows that peace negotiations will be hard for Trump

Hello,

Here are my thoughts on the mineral deal between Ukraine and the United States. The current text is clearly more of a victory for Ukraine than for Donald Trump, but the details will be agreed upon in a separate agreement later.

Watch the video on the website or read the transcript below.

Best,
Anders

Transcript:

We now have the text for the minerals deal that the United States and Ukraine have agreed on. It's been an interesting process to watch how this has come into being. First, Donald Trump's government presented a ridiculous proposal to the Ukrainians that they should pay much more, that they should somehow be in debt and pay 500 billion dollars back to the United States for aid that they had already received, and that wasn't actually intended as a loan.

So it's really been strange to watch. It just seemed like basically the American government treated Ukraine as a kind of colony that they wanted to squeeze resources out of. And this was rejected by the Ukrainians.

Now we have a final deal that they have agreed on. And when you read that text, it really doesn't seem like the United States is getting... It's really hard to see that they're getting anything out of it, to be honest. And at least they're not getting anything that is close to what Trump is claiming that they are getting or that he... You know, it's not even in the ballpark of where they started.

So what is happening now is they have agreed to a kind of framework agreement about a Ukrainian resource fund that they will be managing together. And then, Ukraine will put money into this that comes from extraction of natural resources. And that will then be reinvested into Ukrainian businesses and more resource extraction and such things. It doesn't say anything anymore about paying America back for the aid that Ukraine has received. And interestingly, it also doesn't really say anything about how future aid from the United States would be compensated by Ukraine through these resources.

So I think it's a really interesting case of how Donald Trump has come out with some very, very big and bold statements about this. And then essentially the Ukrainians just told him "no". It appears that they are playing hardball here with the Americans. And I guess that's a good thing.

It's also interesting that we are seeing the Russians at the same time suggesting that, "well, you can use our resources." Putin has suggested an aluminum deal where the Americans can actually extract resources from the occupied Ukrainian territories. So that's what Putin is offering. It's interesting that Putin is actually offering something that is more specific than what the Ukrainians are offering at this point.

So this should be understood as a kind of framework that is, you know, more papers will be written, more deals, agreements will be made about the specifics of how this will work. And on the one hand, the devil is in the details and there might still be some some things coming out of this that really are exploitative of Ukraine. But on the other hand, we can say that so far nothing of that is in the deal. And so far it also doesn't really commit Ukraine to doing anything. So it's basically just kicking the can down the road. Maybe politically this will serve a purpose that it can mean that they can get on with other discussions. And the door is still open that the United States can provide military aid to Ukraine and say that, well, we have everything covered here.

So it's interesting to watch. It doesn't, I think, make it very clear what the goals of the United States are in this and exactly where they stand on the question of future support for Ukraine, or the question of are they really more working to make business deals with Russia now? Is Donald Trump actually siding with Russia or where is he?

But it shows clearly that the Ukrainians are determined not to be bullied around. And that is interesting. It demonstrates self-confidence in what's going on. It demonstrates that Ukraine has confidence that they can actually continue this fight and they can stand up to the United States here and not be in immediate danger of the front collapsing or that they have to do something desperate here. It shows how difficult it will be for Donald Trump to actually push through a peace deal that will have unacceptable terms for Ukraine.

This was a minerals deal, but it's going to be the same thing if Donald Trump and Putin agree on some ridiculous terms in a peace settlement. Ukraine is going to reject that too. And I think that's the primary message to take from all this, that Ukraine is committed to the cause, and that they are not going to let themselves have terms dictated by the American government.

And it really is just strange to watch the negotiations going on here. On the one hand, there's been this discussion about the minerals deal and the same time we have Donald Trump talking now about how he expects a final peace settlement about Ukraine to be done. The war will be over within a couple of weeks. We have Donald Trump also saying that Putin has told him that that the Russians don't have any problems with European peacekeeping forces on Ukrainian territory after a ceasefire. The Russians going out and saying they totally deny this. They will never accept anything even remotely close to that. So it just seems everything is up in the air here.

We have Donald Trump clearly going around and having ideas about how he can make deals. And I must say I don't really see any significant movement on either the Ukrainian side nor the Russian side. Both sides here are still very determined not to let themselves be pushed around by the Americans. And it's just going to be really interesting to follow what's going to happen here. But yeah, well, it would be good if the war is over in a couple of weeks. But I don't see any signs that that's actually going to happen. So we'll see.