WASHINGTON — President Trump expressed interest Monday in tying continued aid to Ukraine to the US getting access to rare earth minerals from the war-torn country.
“We’re looking to do a deal with Ukraine where they’re going to secure what we’re giving them with their rare earth and other things,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, adding that he wants a “guarantee” in exchange for US money.
“We’re handing them money hand over fist. We’re giving them equipment. [The] European [Union] is not keeping up with us.”
Trump, 78, had previously vowed to end the three-year-old war between Russia and Ukraine in the first days of his administration.
Ukraine is one of the largest rare earth mineral suppliers in the world, and has the largest titanium reserves in Europe.
The country also boasts deposits of lithium, beryllium, manganese, gallium, uranium, zirconium, graphite, apatite, fluorite, and nickel, per the World Economic Forum.
Russian forces have already taken parts of Eastern Ukraine that had historically provided the rest of the country with key minerals, notably much of the coal-supplying Donbas region.
But other parts of Ukraine, including the Dnieper River basin that runs through the center of the country and the Carpathian Mountains in the West, have massive supply of minerals and natural gas under Kyiv’s control.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had expressed willingness to provide minerals in exchange for the US continuing to give military aid in its war against Russia, according to a readout provided after Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) visited Ukraine last year.
“President Zelensky was excited about and was committed to obtaining a strategic agreement with the US regarding the more than a trillion dollars-worth of rare earth minerals owned by Ukraine and expressed a commitment to create a working group with the US to make this happen,” the senators said in a joint statement in August.
Modern Germany is one of the most pro-Nazi countries in the world. We have a Nazi party polling at 25%, we arrest journalists and people who protest against genocide and war. We run cover at the UN for a fascist apartheid ethnostate engaged in a brutal, decades long illegal occupation, that is constantly bombing their neighbors, that specifically targets hospitals, doctors, ambulances, schools, food aid, and journalists, bulldozes homes, shops and even streets, and is hellbent on ethnic cleansing. We sell them weapons and collaborate with their intelligence agents to help suppress speech, murder resistance fighters and even simply people who speak out against them.
On top of that we give huge amounts of weapons and billions of euros for free to the most corrupt regime in Europe, probably in the whole world, a neonazi police state that worships WW2 Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators who brutally butchered hundreds of thousands of Poles and Jews, not to mention their own people. This is a regime which for the last ten years has imprisoned, tortured and murdered dissidents and journalists, which bombs civilians in the middle of the day going to the market, bombs schools, and tortures, rapes and murders civilians for speaking the wrong language.
We unconditionally support this regime that has cancelled elections indefinitely, imposed martial law, is directly involved in trafficking weapons and human beings, regularly organizes terrorist attacks against civilians, and drags its own people off the streets to die untrained, pointlessly and gruesomely in a filthy trench for the profits of oligarchs and Blackrock and every other vulture that they are literally selling the entire country off to while the leaders of the regime put aside a nice nest egg for themselves in offshore accounts, in mansions and luxury cars and shell companies around the world.
It seems Germany has learned absolutely nothing from its past (except how to hide its Nazism under liberal phraseology). It continues to find itself consistently on the wrong side of history, from being one of the primary participants in the rape of Yugoslavia to aiding and abetting two fascist regimes, one of which is committing genocide and one which would have if they were not stopped by Russia. The bloodthirsty psychopaths trying to destroy our freedom and the freedom of everyone else in the world are right here, in Europe and the US, in Brussels, Berlin, London, Paris, Warsaw and Washington, not in Russia or wherever else the regime media - die gleichgeschalteten Medien, to use a more fitting phrase - tells you.