Andrew Grossman
Ukrainian and American official announced Tuesday (2/25) that the two administrations had finalized a deal to plunder Ukraine’s mineral wealth in exchange for continued US military “aid” to the country in its war against Russian aggression. In exchange for the Ukrainian lackey government of Zelensky signing over to US imperialism 50% of all future revenue from mining of rare earths and other metals, the US will continue to supply Ukraine with funding and weaponry for its proxy war against Russian imperialism.
Zelensky already offered his country’s mineral wealth as an incentive to the US and the European powers in 2024 in his “Victory Plan”. Trump said he expects Zelensky to sign the deal during the latter’s trip to the US on Friday (2/28).
While the latest mineral mapping of Ukraine is decades old, the mineral wealth the US vultures stand to gain is estimated between the hundreds of billions upwards to the trillions of dollars. Millions of dollars in investments will be needed to repair mining and electrical infrastructure devastated by the war, further ensuring a lasting servile debt relationship between Ukraine and the US.
This comes amid Trump’s bilateral talks with Putin to secure a peace agreement in Ukraine, three years into the war. In the terms of the talks, Russia would keep the territory it has conquered while the US would oversee the deployment of European “peacekeeping” forces into the rest of Ukraine. Putin has maintained his demands for a “demilitarized” Ukraine to create a buffer zone between NATO countries and Russia, and has offered to share in the plunder of minerals in the conquered territories of eastern Ukraine as part of the developing talks.
The European imperialists are chafing against being cut out of the peace talks, while Zelensky, for his part, is making a show of national sovereignty while directly signing away his country’s wealth by asking for “a sentence” to be added to the draft agreement on “security guarantees” from the US.
American monopoly media experts are complaining about the “protection racket” appearance of the deal—which is to say they are embarrassed by how bare-faced the imperialists have become in their standard practice of extorting and subjugating the countries of the Third World.
Funding for the Ukraine war has been a point of contention between the two party mafias, with the Democrats pushing for continued armament to the lackey government of Zelensky to counter their Russian imperialist adversaries while funneling money to the war industrialists, claimed as job-creating slaughter for “American workers”. Republicans questioned what American capital would get out of the proxy war—a question Trump has now answered.
China is the long-term target of the mineral deal and Trump’s peace talks with Putin; since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, China has become an increasingly important trade and military partner with Russia, and Chinese social-imperialism benefits from the contention and war amid its rivals in Europe, including Russia. US imperialism seeks to undercut its reliance on China for rare earth minerals, according to an unnamed US official cited by monopoly media. Trump’s National Security Advisor Mike Walz bragged that a single aluminum mine in Ukraine could meet the entire US domestic need for the metal once US capital is invested into it.
Photo: Zelensky meets with Trump and Vance at the White House on February 28, 2025.
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