Trump's Lethal Ukraine Plan
The British newspaper "The Telegraph" published a paper said to be President Trump's "confidential" plan for the future of Ukraine. It is based on the assumption that Ukraine received assistance to the tune of $500 billion from the Biden administration which Trump considers a loan to be repaid by Ukraine.
Donald Trump’s demand for a $500bn (£400bn) “payback” from Ukraine goes far beyond US control over the country’s critical minerals. It covers everything from ports and infrastructure to oil and gas, and the larger resource base of the country.
The terms of the contract that landed at Volodymyr Zelensky’s office a week ago amount to the US economic colonisation of Ukraine, in legal perpetuity. It implies a burden of reparations that cannot possibly be achieved. The document has caused consternation and panic in Kyiv.
The Telegraph has obtained a draft of the pre-decisional contract, marked “Privileged & Confidential’ and dated Feb 7 2025. It states that the US and Ukraine should form a joint investment fund to ensure that “hostile parties to the conflict do not benefit from the reconstruction of Ukraine”.
The agreement covers the “economic value associated with resources of Ukraine”, including “mineral resources, oil and gas resources, ports, other infrastructure (as agreed)”, leaving it unclear what else might be encompassed. “This agreement shall be governed by New York law, without regard to conflict of laws principles,” it states.
The US will take 50pc of recurring revenues received by Ukraine from extraction of resources, and 50pc of the financial value of “all new licences issued to third parties” for the future monetisation of resources. There will be “a lien on such revenues” in favour of the US. “That clause means ‘pay us first, and then feed your children’,” said one source close to the negotiations.
It states that “for all future licences, the US will have a right of first refusal for the purchase of exportable minerals”. Washington will have sovereign immunity and acquire near total control over most of Ukraine’s commodity and resource economy. The fund “shall have the exclusive right to establish the method, selection criteria, terms, and conditions” of all future licences and projects. And so forth, in this vein. It seems to have been written by private lawyers, not the US departments of state or commerce.
Ukraine's ire over draft agreement: 'Subsurface resources are ours, not the U.S.'
Fursa columnist: “We are not in debt to Washington, which is becoming a adversary, not an ally.” On social media, popular anger:
February 18, 2025 at 3:38 pm
KIEV - The dissemination of the draft agreement on the exploitation of Ukrainian rare earths in exchange for the U.S. assistance that Washington's envoy submitted to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, anticipated by The Telegraph, rained down on Kiev with the violence of the Iskanders (rockets) launched from Moscow. Faced with the evidence of the capricious terms that Ukraine's biggest ally seeks to impose on it, the media and social media became red-hot.
Oleksiy Plotnikov, chief researcher at the Institute of Economics of the National Academy of Sciences, is also “skeptical,” and he is “about the very assessment of Ukraine's mineral resources: they were made during the Soviet era and much has changed since then.” The problem with the draft agreement, he says, is in the “vagueness of the wording on the part of President Zelensky,” who had proposed it “without any conditions in return: he had thought about them but had not formulated them,” and the result of the U.S. draft would instead be “the ceding of territory that would become unsuitable for hosting life forms.”
“According to the Constitution, the subsoil belongs to the Ukrainian people. It cannot be given to anyone, period,” says MP Oleksiy Kucherenko. On social media, the distinctions are more... direct: “But what reparations should we pay?” asks Oleksandr Rekalo: “The U.S. must pay us and provide us with weapons as a guarantee of the protection promised when we deprived ourselves of the third largest nuclear potential in the world. The US puts itself on the same level as other autocracies. If that's the case, let them go where the Russian ship goes,” the one that at the beginning of the invasion was sent to that country (sunk) by the Ukrainian garrison on Serpent Island.
But the elements in favor end there, and they are only theoretical: “It was a very strange agreement. The U.S.,” he writes, ‘proposed to create a Fund for the exploitation of existing and new mineral resources’ but made no commitment. Their idea, he argues, is that “they have already helped Ukraine, which is now repaying its debt. But we have no debt to the U.S. Under the Biden administration the considerable support received at a critical time for survival was in the form of grants, and the decision on those grants was made by the United States. Whatever fund is created, it cannot discuss the assistance already provided.”
The trouble is that even on “future operations,” on which the fund could be effective and even “profitable and attractive to Ukraine,” Fursa is highly skeptical: “Judging from Vance's speeches in Munich, the U.S. is ceasing to be a friend, an ally and a partner, and is becoming am adversary. This agreement does not involve sending U.S. troops to protect Ukrainian resources, and there has never been any special interest by their companies in our subsoil. Instead, this fund could be a free tool with which to control our resources: they will not be mined, but they will not end up in the hands of the Americans' competitors: from the latest statements of U.S. officials these competitors could also be Europeans.”
Amid endless improperities, disappointments and ire, the most articulate and analytical reaction was published by columnist and financier Serhiy Fursa, picked up by many Ukrainian media outlets. While recognizing in the U.S. proposal a potential benefit for Ukraine, he glimpses strong reservations about the U.S.'s real intentions: “An agreement with the U.S. is attractive,” he writes, because “it could facilitate the arrival of American investors” bringing “money for the budget” and “job creation” with a “reduction in the role of oligarchs, at least Ukrainian ones.”
“People are dying at an insane rate and these crooks are doing lucrative business,” protests Yuri Manita on Facebook. “Give us back our nuclear weapons and we don't need anything else from them,” argues Oleksandr Galushko: ‘Steady nerves,’ warns Olena Reshetnyak, ”no one knows anything yet, all this is to destabilize the country.” But Natalia Datsenko protests, “The US exerts economic pressure on the victim instead of the aggressor.” “We ask the U.S. for protection and they want to loot us-that's why we have to be independent,” Maria Malychenko retorts.
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