Washington demands access to Ukraine’s natural resources. Trump says America stands to gain $500 billion, but there’s reason to doubt his math.

Donald Trump has bothered with no niceties in pursuing an agreement with Kyiv to carve up Ukraine’s natural resources. At first, the White House appeared to seek American mining rights on “rare earth” metal deposits as compensation for past and future U.S. military and financial aid. However, when direct negotiations began, Washington demanded even more without offering any security guarantees. 

Leaks to journalists reveal that the Trump administration wants Volodymyr Zelensky to agree to create a joint U.S.-Ukraine fund that would manage resource extraction rights. This entity would then distribute those rights in favor of as-yet-unnamed American investors, while the subsequent profits from the extraction and sale of Ukraine’s resources would be split 50/50 between Kyiv and Washington. Additionally, the U.S. would receive half the revenue of all new resource extraction licenses issued to third parties.

Trump’s appetite in Ukraine has grown. The White House estimates that this deal would be worth $500 billion to the United States — well beyond the estimated value of the rare earth deposits on Ukrainian-controlled territory. 

In its initial draft agreement, Washington demanded access to a wide range of materials critically important to the U.S., like lithium and titanium, and traditional energy resources, including oil and natural gas. The Telegraph reported that the deal also mentions revenue-sharing from American use of Ukrainian ports and other infrastructure — terms the British newspaper argued are even harsher than the financial penalties imposed on Germany and Japan after World War II.

For now, it seems unlikely. President Zelensky, who initially lobbied for an agreement, has firmly rejected the White House’s initial terms. This first became evident during his meeting with the new U.S. treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, in Kyiv on February 12. According to reports, Zelensky saw the draft document — prepared in Washington — only four hours before the negotiations began.

Discussions over the terms continued on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference. Zelensky’s scheduled meeting with U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance nearly collapsed when the White House demanded Kyiv’s immediate agreement and reportedly refused to accept any of Ukraine’s requested amendments, most of which concerned explicit security guarantees from America. At the last moment, Washington softened its stance and allowed the meeting to proceed.

Days later, U.S. and Russian delegations met in Saudi Arabia to discuss a resolution in Ukraine. Not invited to the talks, President Zelensky protested, leading to a public dispute with Donald Trump that soon escalated to the U.S. leader calling his Ukrainian counterpart “a dictator without elections.”

Despite Trump’s criticism, Kyiv and Washington have not abandoned negotiations for a deal on American rights to Ukrainian natural resources. According to Reuters, the Trump administration is considering a simplified agreement. Sources told the agency that this “revised approach” would “sidestep numerous legal and logistical hurdles” and postpone decisions on details (like revenue sharing). 

Donald Trump is reportedly most interested in securing an agreement that confirms Ukraine’s willingness to compensate the U.S. for its assistance. One source told Reuters that signing a deal is more important to the American president than the specifics of the agreement itself. On Wednesday, Trump said he planned to “resurrect” negotiations with Kyiv and again threatened Zelensky if he refused to sign. 

The next day, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz told Fox News that Washington had offered Zelensky’s administration a “historic opportunity to have the United States of America co-invest in Ukraine,” arguing that the proposed financial ties were “the best security guarantee they could ever hope for, much more than another pallet of ammunition.” On Friday, after the Ukrainian president met in Kyiv with Trump’s special envoy, Keith Kellogg, Waltz told the Conservative Political Action Conference, “Zelensky is going to sign that deal, and you will see that in the very short term.”

According to Axios, Ukraine received an “improved” version of the agreement, which reportedly addresses some of Zelensky’s concerns. One key change appears to be removing a clause that would have placed the deal under New York state’s legal jurisdiction. However, it remains unclear whether the $500 billion “satisfaction” clause is still in the agreement or if Washington has agreed to lower its compensation demands.

The short answer: Nobody knows.

Sources who spoke to European Pravda said even the Ukrainian authorities are unsure where Trump got this number. The $500 billion figure was reportedly prepared in Washington, and Kyiv has “serious doubts” about its accuracy. White House representatives reportedly traveled to Ukraine and consulted with at least one local investment management fund to reach their assessment. However, if the agreement — as the U.S. president continues to claim — concerns rare earth metals, then the valuation might be based solely on unverified Soviet-era geological surveys.

Bloomberg columnist and energy expert Javier Blas also tried to get to the bottom of the Trump administration’s natural-resource ambitions in Ukraine. Blas concluded that the president’s numbers do not add up:

In fact, Ukraine has no significant rare-earth deposits other than small scandium mines, explained Blas. The U.S. Geological Survey doesn’t even list the country as holding any rare earths. In other words, Washington’s estimate likely includes critical materials like titanium, lithium, graphite, and other raw materials. However, this expanded scope still doesn’t get a U.S.-Ukraine deal to Trump’s $500-billion valuation, raising two possibilities: either America’s president has access to information unknown to experts, or he is relying on bad information.

Blas found one possible source for the misinformation: a study from the Lithuania-based NATO Energy Security Center of Excellence, an autonomous entity only loosely affiliated with the military alliance. The organization’s report makes provocative declarations about Ukraine emerging as a “key potential supplier of rare earth metals such as titanium, lithium, beryllium, manganese, gallium, [and] uranium” — none of which are rare earths.

Of course, it’s possible that Trump has always sought a share of all of Ukraine’s natural resources, not merely its rare earth metals and critical materials (leaked terms in the White House’s draft agreement seem to support this theory). However, so far, the U.S. president has publicly spoken only about rare earth metals.

Ukraine does, in fact, possess substantial coal and iron ore deposits. The total estimated value of all natural resources in the country ranges from $15 trillion to “tens of trillions” of dollars. However, most of these reserves are located in occupied parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions (along with Dnipropetrovsk, these areas account for 70 percent of Ukraine’s total reserves). As Russian troops continue their slow but steady advance in the Donbas, it is extremely difficult to assess what Ukraine could really explore, extract, and commercialize in partnership with the United States.