US President Donald Trump has said he wants Ukraine to pay $500 billion back against the US aid in the form of rare-earth minerals, reports said.
Trump said, “The United States is in for more than $300 billion, probably 350” in various forms of aid to Ukraine, adding that it would be “stupid” for Washington to continue bankrolling Kiev without receiving anything in return.
“I want to have our money secured because we’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars,” he said. “They have tremendously valuable land in terms of rare earth, in terms of oil and gas, in terms of other things.”
“I told them that I want the equivalent, like $500 billion worth of rare earths, and they’ve essentially agreed to do that,” Trump said. “So at least we don’t feel stupid. Otherwise, we’re stupid. I said to them, we have to get something.”
“You know, they may make a deal, they may not make a deal, they may be Russian someday, or they may not be Russian someday, but we’re going to have all this money in there, and I say, I want it back,” he added.
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Confirming the development, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has said that he is open to reaching an agreement over Kiev’s deposits of lithium, titanium, and other heavy metals.
However, he insisted that first Western forces must help Kiev push out Russian forces from the mineral-rich territories before they could invest, although this appears to be a distant reality considering the resources and assets Moscow has already deployed in the region.
Before the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, the country had Europe’s largest reserves of titanium and lithium.
The list of rare-earth metals that can be found in Ukraine also includes beryllium, manganese, gallium, uranium, zirconium, graphite, apatite, fluorite, and nickel.
Forbes's recent report suggested that around $7 trillion of Ukraine’s total mineral wealth is located in its former Donbas regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, which declared independence from Ukraine in 2014 following the Western-backed Maidan coup in Kiev.
Most of the mineral-rich territories of Ukraine have already been governed by Russia since the 2014 and 2022 takeover of the resource-rich territories.
Resources in these territories are a major factor in NATO member states’ support for Kiev, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in October 2024.
“Their discourse revolves around territory and resources that they require in America,” he said. “Our concern is not territories, but people.”
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