'This Is Something That President Trump Does Over And Over Again,' Geopolitical Strategist Says About Failed Rare Minerals Deal With Ukraine President Zelenskyy

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance on Friday but left the White House without signing an agreement for rare minerals.

The meeting, originally set to finalize the deal over critical minerals as a form of repayment for military aid, escalated into a heated exchange as Trump accused the Ukrainian leader of "gambling with World War III."

"You're either going to make a deal or we're out," Trump noted. "And if we're out, you'll fight it out and I don't think it's going to be pretty."

Trump’s administration moved to sign the proposal earlier this month, but Ukrainian officials stalled. They called the bid exploitative and rushed and stated that Kyiv could not accept it in that form.

After weeks of negotiation, the two parties found common ground, dropping Trump’s original $500 billion proposal but not including security guarantees — one of Kyiv’s key demands, which Trump wanted to address "later on." According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, the U.S. donated $118 billion during the three-year conflict.

Rare earth minerals are used in numerous modern technologies, from electric vehicles to defense systems. Per EU classifications, Ukraine holds deposits of 22 out of 34 of those minerals. Still, in a war-ridden country, getting to those minerals might be an issue.

According to Al Jazeera, most of those deposits are in Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporzhizhia, Dnipropetrovsk, Korovohrad, Poltava and Kharkiv, with the Russian Federation controlling about 40% of them.

Besides the war factor, BCA Research Chief Strategist Marko Papic noted yet another issue.

"Even if you somehow manage to get the rare earths out, the question would be — where do you refine them? And the fact is that most of them would have to go to China. I mean, that’s the critical bottleneck in this whole situation," he said on LinkedIn.

Furthermore, Papic sees the entire situation as Trump’s way of garnering domestic support.

"I think it’s the way to effectively build domestic political consensus for continued support of Ukraine. Many of his voters, many of his supporters, many conservatives in the U.S., specifically Republican voters, are increasingly becoming skeptical of continued support for Ukraine. Polling shows that the vast majority believe that Ukraine’s aid has already been too much. Therefore, this is the way for President Trump to do something domestically," he noted, pointing at the parallels with the USMCA agreement from 2020.

"This is something that President Trump does over and over again. The theater surrounding many of his deals, the back and forth, calling countries bad names, saying they should be states of the United States … that’s in many ways designed to build domestic consensus, particularly among his voters," Papic concluded

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