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President Donald Trump will host Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday to sign what he called “a very big agreement” on sharing revenue from Ukraine’s rare earth mineral deposits.
“It’s now confirmed, and we’re going to be signing an agreement,” Trump said Wednesday morning at the outset of his first Cabinet meeting at the White House.
Trump had suggested Tuesday evening that the meeting was not yet locked in, as Ukraine continued to work through the final details of the arrangement with U.S. negotiators.
The meeting is likely to occur at the White House, according to a person familiar with the plans, and not Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, where the president is scheduled to travel to Friday evening.
Trump continued to present the agreement, the details of which remain unknown, as a way for the U.S. to recoup some of the aid sent to Ukraine over the course of the three-year war. The U.S. has sent Ukraine $120 billion so far. Trump has inflated the amount, falsely stating again Wednesday that American taxpayers were on the hook for “$350 billion” in aid.
“We’ve been able to make a deal where we’re going to be able to get our money back,” Trump said. “We’re happy about it.”
Zelenskyy, speaking with reporters in Kyiv on Wednesday, called the agreement “a beginning,” cautioning that a lot will hinge on his conversations with Trump and the necessity for additional security guarantees, a key point of tension.
“I will understand everything after I talk to Trump. For me, the most important thing is to find out will the U.S. stop military aid or not,” he said. “If its stops, will we be able to buy weapons directly from the U.S., maybe using Russian frozen assets?”
Trump is eager to broker an agreement to end the war in Ukraine but, so far, has directed his pressure campaign almost entirely at Zelenskyy while parroting a number of Russian talking points and preemptively agreeing to some of the Kremlin’s key demands about how to resolve the conflict.
The mineral deal with Ukraine would not end the war. Trump this week has stated that Europe will be primarily responsible for backing Ukraine militarily, even as French President Emmanuel Macron reminded him during a White House visit Monday that the strongest security guarantee possible requires the backing of the U.S.
Asked what security guarantees the U.S. would provide, Trump was blunt: “I’m not going to make security guarantees very much because we’re going to have Europe do that,” he said during a lengthy back and forth with reporters during his Cabinet meeting Wednesday.
But he suggested that an American presence in Ukraine amounted to “automatic security,” as proponents of the agreement have argued, “because nobody’s going to be messing around with our people.”
Zelenskyy’s outrage at the terms of the Trump administration’s initial proposal — it called for Ukraine to provide the U.S. $500 billion in future revenue — led to a public spat between the two leaders. But after three years of war, the Ukrainian leader had little choice but to hammer out some agreement with the U.S. in hopes that it will keep Trump invested in his country’s future and have some deterring effect on Russia from launching another invasion.
Trump, during comments Tuesday, also expressed interest in buying “minerals on Russian land, too.” That came one day after Russian President Vladimir Putin said he’d be interested in striking his own deal with Trump to allow the U.S. to access his country’s mineral deposits.
Veronika Melkozerova contributed to this report.
