Experts react: At last, the US and Ukraine signed a minerals deal. Here’s what to expect next.
Rock paper signed. After months of getting close only to come up short—including a rocky Oval Office meeting in late February between US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy—the United States and Ukraine quietly struck a much-anticipated economic partnership on Wednesday. The agreement is intended to open US access to Ukraine’s natural resources, including its critical minerals, while helping to finance Ukraine’s reconstruction. What does the partnership entail? Where do Washington and Kyiv stand with each other now? And what message does the deal send to Russia? Below, Atlantic Council experts dig into the details and offer their answers.
This post will be updated with more expert reactions as the story develops.
Click to jump to an expert analysis:
Shelby Magid: Ukraine is now in its strongest position since Trump took office
Ed Verona: With its unequal and exploitative terms, the deal’s future is uncertain
Doug Klain: The hard-won deal could reopen the door to more US military aid to Ukraine
Ukraine is now in its strongest position since Trump took office
With the deal finally signed, Ukrainian officials can breathe an all too rare sigh of relief. Between fighting off a full-scale invasion and navigating a rocky road with Washington through cease-fire proposals, summits, contentious meetings, and a now iconic pull-aside meeting at the funeral of Pope Francis, Ukrainians have put in tremendous effort to close a deal that puts them in their strongest position yet with Washington since Trump took office.
Through intense negotiations, Ukrainian officials showed they could maneuver and persevere to ultimately get a fair deal. While the Trump administration put tremendous pressure on Ukraine to accept earlier deals, Ukraine managed to show that it is not just a junior partner that has to roll over and accept a bad deal. Ukrainian officials put their nation’s future first and managed the serious work to get to a final agreement that can be called a win on both sides.
This success and improvement in the US-Ukraine relationship comes as the Trump administration expresses increasing frustrations with Russia, questioning President Vladimir Putin’s willingness to end the war. Ukraine found itself under major attack shortly after the deal was signed, evidence of Putin’s pique at the agreement. While peace talks slow, the United States partially lifted its pause on military aid for Ukraine, approving the Trump administration’s first fifty million dollars’ worth of arms exports to the country through direct commercial sales.
As US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put it: “This agreement signals clearly to Russia that the Trump Administration is committed to a peace process centered on a free, sovereign, and prosperous Ukraine over the long term.” Such a statement and commitment from Washington now undercuts all of the Kremlin’s aims. With this deal and the administration’s other recent statements, perhaps Putin might realize he once again underestimated Ukraine.
—Shelby Magid is deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.
With its unequal and exploitative terms, the deal’s future is uncertain
It must come as a relief to the Ukrainians that the United States dropped its insistence on including the cost of all previous financial and military aid on the balance sheet of this deal. Nevertheless, the so-called partnership agreement is so onerous that it is tantamount to picking the pockets of an assault victim. Faced with an invasion by an enemy three times its size, Ukraine had little choice but to acquiesce to terms that reduce it to the status of a virtual colony or risk incurring the enmity of what has been until recently one of its staunchest allies. Under such extenuating circumstances, Zelenskyy bit the bullet and signed off on the deal. However, some nettlesome questions remain.
Will this deal have to be ratified by the Rada, Ukraine’s legislature? The unequal and exploitative terms are not likely to be accepted without opposition from across the Ukrainian political spectrum. Is the deal subject to a “yes or no” vote, or will amendments be considered? If it is ratified by a slim majority, then would potential investors be willing to commit to projects if a future government might abrogate a deal that was arguably imposed under duress?
The history of mineral resources deals offers ample reason to doubt that this one would stand up well over the period typically required to develop large and capital-intensive projects with lead times of up to a decade. Russia, ironically, provides an example of how resource-related deals can come unraveled. Production sharing agreements signed during the difficult transitional period of the 1990s were subsequently repudiated by Putin’s regime, with Western partners forced to surrender control and majority ownership in major projects. There are many more such examples in the developing world. I suspect that few serious US investors will put their shareholders’ money at risk based on such a clearly unbalanced “deal.”
—Ed Verona is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center covering Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, with a particular focus on Ukrainian reconstruction aid.
The hard-won deal could reopen the door to more US military aid to Ukraine
After months of tough negotiations and cease-fires agreed to, Ukraine has given Trump another win. The announcement of an economic partnership between the United States and Ukraine—which started as a deal on access to Ukraine’s minerals but has since morphed into a broader investment fund for Ukraine’s reconstruction—is welcome news for anyone who wants to see Washington step back from the last few months of hostility toward Kyiv.
More than any specifics in this deal, the top takeaway is that while Putin continues to say “no” to Trump’s push for peace, Ukraine has yet again said “yes.”
But the specifics do matter, and Ukraine seems to have pulled off some seriously tough negotiating with the Trump administration. Past proposals from Washington reportedly saw the United States taking partial or total ownership of broad swaths of Ukraine’s natural resources and infrastructure, something that prompted Zelenskyy in February to say, “I’m not going to sign something that ten generations of Ukrainians will be paying for.” Now, Ukraine retains full ownership of its assets and has turned the deal into a joint investment fund toward the country’s future reconstruction, with only future—not past—US assistance to Ukraine counting as a contribution to the fund. It’s a big win indeed after Trump has repeatedly mentioned inflated figures of what Washington has sent to aid Ukraine.
More than anything though, agreeing on a deal may reopen the door to military assistance from the United States to Ukraine. While weapons obligated by the Biden administration continue to flow, Trump has yet to make any new commitments to aid Ukraine’s defense since taking office. Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko, who signed the agreement on Wednesday in Washington, said that in addition to direct financial contributions to the investment fund, new assistance such as air defense systems would be considered an investment in the fund. No country but the United States can provide long-range air defenses against Russia’s ballistic missile strikes on Ukrainian cities.
Trump has spent months searching for a win in Ukraine, and now he’s got one. But Russia’s invasion will not be solved by an economic partnership. Putin has repeatedly rejected cease-fires because he does not want peace—he wants Ukraine. If the White House really hopes to secure a peace deal with Russia, that will require putting meaningful pressure on the Kremlin through the type of new sanctions Congress has prepared and by following through with new military support for Ukraine.
—Doug Klain is a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.
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Image: A general view shows the open pit mine of Zavallievsky Graphite, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Zavallia, Ukraine, February 10, 2025. REUTERS/Thomas Peter