NEW YORK\/WASHINGTON: The Trump administration may seek to strike a simplified minerals deal with Ukraine to get a pact in place quickly and later negotiate detailed terms, such as how much of Ukraine\u2019s vast resources the US would own, two people with knowledge of the matter told Reuters on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
This follows Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky\u2019s rejection of a detailed US proposal last week that would have seen Washington receiving 50 percent of Ukraine\u2019s critical minerals, which include graphite, uranium, titanium and lithium, the latter a key component in electric car batteries.<\/p>\n
That episode made clear that reaching a full deal will take time, the sources said.<\/p>\n
But US President Donald Trump wants a pact with Ukraine in place before potentially authorizing more US military support for Kyiv or moving ahead with a bid to broker formal peace talks between Ukraine and Russia to end the three-year-old war, which was triggered by Moscow\u2019s invasion of its neighbor.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg is in Kyiv this week to discuss the parameters of a revised pact and what Ukraine needs in return for signing.<\/p>\n
Zelensky said he would meet with Kellogg on Thursday \u201cand it is crucial for us that this meeting \u2014 and overall cooperation with America \u2014 be constructive.\u201d<\/p>\n
When asked if US officials would continue to pursue a deal, a Trump adviser, speaking on condition of anonymity, said about Zelensky: \u201cAbsolutely, we need to get this guy back to reality.\u201d<\/p>\n
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n
The push for a deal continues despite a widening rift between Trump and Zelensky. Trump denounced his Ukrainian counterpart as \u201ca dictator without elections\u201d on Wednesday after Zelensky said Trump was trapped in a Russian disinformation bubble, a response to the US president suggesting Ukraine started the war.<\/p>\n
The United States has provided tens of billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine in the past three years , and Trump has said US investment in Ukrainian minerals could ensure \u201cthat we\u2019re going to in some form get this money back.\u201d He is pushing for Kyiv to grant the US mineral concessions worth $500 billion in recognition of Washington\u2019s aid.
\nThe sources said it is important to Trump that he can signal publicly to the American people that the US is recouping the aid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
NEW YORK\/WASHINGTON: The Trump administration may seek to strike a simplified minerals deal with Ukraine to get a pact in place quickly and later negotiate detailed terms, such as how much of Ukraine\u2019s vast resources the US would own, two people with knowledge of the matter told Reuters on Wednesday. This follows Ukrainian President Volodymyr …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":77352,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77334"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77334\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77353,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77334\/revisions\/77353"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}