Prime Minister of Ukraine Denys Shmyhal has confirmed that an agreement with the United States on rare earth metals is to be signed ‘this day’. This was reported by Suspilne with reference to Shmyhal's words during a telethon.
According to him, the teams are currently agreeing on technical details. The document is expected to be ready for signing within a day.
‘This is an agreement on the establishment of an investment fund in Ukraine. It is a 50-50 split of management and contributions from the parties. The contributions will be in cash. The US side can contribute new military aid as a contribution to this fund. Ukraine retains control over all resources - subsoil, infrastructure, natural resources. Ukraine makes a contribution from the new mineral rent,’ he said.
The investment fund will contribute to Ukraine's recovery for ten years. It will be jointly managed: Ukraine and the United States will have three representatives each. The Prime Minister described the agreement as a partnership and added that Ukraine would be able to receive military assistance from the United States.
Ukrainian and Western media reported today that Deputy Prime Minister Yuliya Svyrydenko had already arrived in the United States to sign the agreement. Suspilne quoted a source as saying that Ukraine was ready to sign the deal today.
Bloomberg reported that the draft agreement on the creation of a joint fund for investment management had already been finalised. According to the agency, the United States will have privileged access to new investment projects to develop Ukraine's natural resources, including aluminium, graphite, oil, and natural gas.
Importantly, the US agreed in the text of the document that only future US military assistance will be counted as contributions to the fund.
Ukraine-US agreement
On 17 April, Ukraine and the United States signed a memorandum of intent to establish a joint investment fund.
Ukraine and the United States were going to sign a framework agreement, on the basis of which a specific document would be developed, which would need to be approved by the Verkhovna Rada. Washington tried to include Ukraine's $300bn ‘debt’ in the document. Recently, it admitted that the aid was about $100bn, a figure that Kyiv had been quoting. The agreement was supposed to be signed in February, during Volodymyr Zelenskyy's visit to Washington. But it was postponed amid a quarrel with Donald Trump during the meeting.
In March, it became known that the United States had handed over a new draft subsoil agreement to Ukraine. Government representatives received one version of the document, while the President's Office received another.
Negotiations on new agreements continued. On 1 April, the two countries held the first round of consultations.
Subsequently, the Ukrainian delegation flew to Washington, D.C., where technical teams held talks. Zelenskyy said that the meeting between the Ukrainian and American teams on the fossil fuel agreement was positive, and that new contacts would take place during the week.
In general, the idea of partner countries' access to Ukrainian resources was proposed in the President's Victory Plan presented last year. But active work in this direction began after Donald Trump returned to power, insisting that the United States should be reimbursed for the aid it had given to Ukraine. The US president used numbers that were not confirmed by Ukraine or analysts: he said that the US had provided $300 billion in aid. Eventually, after lengthy negotiations, Washington retracted this claim and said that the aid was worth more than $100bn.
To work on the final agreement, Ukraine hired a US law firm, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.