After Trump publicly expressed interest to obtain $500 billion worth of rare earth minerals from Ukraine, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Wednesday that the mineral deal between the United States and Ukraine would provide Ukraine with post-war security.
Volodymyr Zelensky told reporters that the United States had presented Ukraine with a first draft of the agreement on Wednesday and that Kiev is hoping the two sides would reach an agreement at the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 14-16.
Ukraine is rich in mineral resources that could be worth trillions of dollars. In the list of 50 key strategic minerals by the United States, Ukraine owns 23 of them. In the EU’s list of 34 key strategic minerals, Ukraine has 26. Moreover, in five of the key raw materials, titanium, graphite, lithium, beryllium and rare earth elements, Ukraine is in a very competitive position.
Titanium is an important raw material for industries such as aerospace, defense, chemicals and pigment manufacturing. Ukraine has the largest titanium reserves in Europe and is able to meet the demand of the US and the EU for the metal titanium for more than 25 years.
As for the metal beryllium, only a few countries in the world are engaged in the mining and processing of beryllium ore, and Ukraine has an explored Perzhansk beryllium deposit. The deposit has 13,900 tons of beryllium oxide reserves, which can meet the global production demand for more than 20 years.
Although Ukraine’s lithium reserves are insignificant in global terms, they account for about a third of the proven reserves of European countries, so Ukraine has the potential to become an important supply source of lithium carbonate or lithium hydroxide for the European battery industry.
Ukraine also has a large amount of germanium reserves, germanium is difficult to independently mineralization, often exists in the form of compounds in sphalerite, argentoarsenite, silver, lead, iron ore and coal. Ukraine also has about 20% of the world’s reserves of graphite, an indispensable material for the production of high-performance batteries.
However, while Ukraine has large quantities of rare earths and minerals such as uranium and titanium, it does not currently produce rare earths and has not produced them in recent decades, according to the US Geological Survey. Reuters and the Kiev-based think tank We Build Ukraine estimate that 40 percent of Ukraine’s metal mineral resources cannot be mined due to Russian occupation. Zelensky himself said that almost 20 percent of Ukraine’s mineral resources are occupied by Russia.
Gracelin Baskaran, a critical mineral security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, noted that globally, it takes an average of 15 years to develop a mine, a decades-long undertaking. In addition to extracting minerals from the ground, designing new mineral supply chains requires an entire ecosystem, including processing, refining, and manufacturing systems, all of which take time and heavy investment.
Experts point out that due to the war between Russia and Ukraine, the private sector has little interest in investing in Ukraine. Bryan Bille, a policy expert at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence said: “I think Zelensky made a smart move to convince the Trump administration to continue to aid Ukraine. But at the end of the day, how do you develop these deposits and bring these projects online, that could take years.”
