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Donald Trump’s grab for Ukraine’s minerals, which the US president is demanding as compensation for his country’s wartime assistance to Kyiv, might seem like a new low in a week of US-Ukraine relations lows.
The latest draft of Trump’s “minerals deal” would grant the US substantial control of a new fund that would invest in Ukrainian reconstruction. The fund would receive 50% of the profits from the future monetisation of government-owned Ukrainian natural resources such as lithium and titanium, as well as coal, gas, oil and uranium.
This deal, despite offering no guarantee of continued US military support, is a slight improvement on Trump’s first offering. That bid would have imposed financial conditions on Ukraine harsher than those forced on Germany after the first world war.
However, the deal will still require future generations of Ukrainians to shoulder the cost of a war for which they bear no responsibility. Commentators, including British foreign minister David Lammy, have noted that it would be more just to seize frozen Russian assets and use them to cover the cost of repairing the damage Russia has wreaked across the country.
But, while many in the west have balked at Trump’s barefaced extractivism, his actions are entirely in line with the way western capitalists have approached Ukraine and its resources since the 19th century.
Ukraine’s east, referred to as Donbas, is often thought to have been industrialised in the 1930s, when Joseph Stalin was leading the Soviet Union. At this time, Donbas was marketed to the world as a symbol of proletarian superabundance. It was a place where miners and steelworkers exceeded their production quotas by 30 or 40 times.
But the development of industrial extraction in eastern Ukraine dates back much earlier and was powered, in part, by European capital and technology.
In the mid-19th century, when this part of Ukraine was controlled by the Russian empire, the Russian tsars opened the country’s borders to foreign capital investment in the hopes of accelerating its industrialisation drive. A series of fiscal measures were introduced that made it more attractive to foreigners to invest in the empire’s emerging industrial markets.
This encouraged a wave of economic migration from western Europe to all regions of the multinational state. Foreign capitalists often partnered with Russian business elites based in Saint Petersburg and other major cities and set about generating huge amounts of profit from the extraction of the empire’s valuable resources.
Donbas, with its wealth of minerals, was a region of particular interest for foreign capitalists. French, Belgian, German, Dutch and British industrialists all relocated to the region in the second half of the 19th century hoping to make their fortunes by excavating the region’s salt, chalk, gypsum, and coal. In fact, there was so much Belgian capital circulating at one point that Donbas became known as “the tenth Belgian province”.
Despite the paternalism of some foreign managers, the extraction of Ukraine’s minerals did little to improve the life of local communities. Rather, it contributed to the displacement of indigenous people and caused massive environmental and ecological damage.
Urban planning often replicated the segregated conditions of European colonies in Africa and India. Foreign settlers lived apart from local workers, in privileged housing located in better provisioned parts of town downwind of the toxic fumes of the blast furnaces and the chimney stacks.
In the settlement of Hughesovka (now known as Donetsk), which was named after the Welsh industrialist John Hughes, Welsh settlers attempted to reconstruct the trappings of British life on the Ukrainian steppe.
They built tennis courts and an Anglican church, arranged tea parties, and even had an amateur dramatics society. Meanwhile, the local workforce lived in abject poverty, often accommodated in barracks or mud dugouts.
In these dismal conditions, infectious disease and dissatisfaction were widespread. There are several reports of riots following large-scale outbreaks of cholera and local hospitals were reportedly overflowing.
Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, this period of European capitalist exploitation was drawing considerable interest from researchers.
The “European” industrial heritage of Donbas was being used to tell different stories about the region and to highlight its complex, multicultural history. This heritage was seen to hold potential as a counter-narrative to the toxic “Russian world” propaganda emanating from the occupied territories, which maintains that Ukraine is an integral part of Russia’s historic sphere of cultural influence.
But there is a danger in being too romantic about this chapter in history. Foreign capitalist investment in the extraction of Ukrainian minerals was not a classic example of settler colonialism. However, it bore many similarities to western European colonial practices in other parts of the world at this time.
What this history reminds us is that Ukraine has long been located at the intersection of empires. And these empires have often collaborated to plunder the country’s resources, offering little or nothing in return.
We can see this kind of predatory collaboration of imperial and neo-imperial regimes once again taking shape. Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, is trying to tempt Trump away from a deal with Ukraine with promises of access to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals in the occupied territories.
We must continue to gather and protest, as many of us did on the three-year anniversary of the full-scale invasion this week, to resist such politics of resourcification.
Victoria Donovan’s research has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, 2019-2023.
