Kyiv faces sustained pressure from high-ranking U.S. officials to agree to a resource-sharing deal that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has judged is not in his country’s interest, under terms Washington has presented.
U.S. President Donald Trump wants Kyiv to deliver what he’s called “equalization” for the support Washington has provided, amid Ukraine’s ongoing fight against a full-scale Russian invasion. And he wants that payment in the form of access to Ukraine’s rare-earth minerals, worth around $500 billion US.
Trump dispatched U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to Kyiv last week to try to reach an agreement on this but Zelenskyy rejected the proposed terms, saying they were too unfavourable to Ukraine and did not include specific security guarantees.
But U.S. officials aren’t backing away. On Thursday, Mike Waltz, the White House national security adviser, called on Zelenskyy to “come back to the table” on negotiations related to the minerals issue, while Bessent chided the Ukrainian leader for not having agreed to the deal the U.S. first presented.
“Rather than enter into some constructive conversations about what that deal should be going forward, we got a lot of rhetoric in the media that was incredibly unfortunate,” Waltz said of the Ukrainians’ decision to decline the U.S. offer.
In Kyiv, Zelenskyy had spent part of his Thursday meeting with Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia. Yet after the sit-down, a planned news conference was cancelled and replaced with a brief photo session, and a Ukrainian presidential spokesperson said this was in line with U.S. wishes.
The U.S. delegation made no comment.
In a post on X, Zelenskyy wrote that he’d had “a productive meeting” with Kellogg, and that he was “grateful to the United States for all the assistance and bipartisan support for Ukraine and the Ukrainian people.”
Reuters reported Wednesday that the Trump administration was considering presenting a simplified minerals deal to Zelenskyy, though the Ukrainian president did not appear to reference that in his social media remarks on Thursday.
Changing stance in Washington
Ukraine has faced nearly three years of all-out war, after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of its neighbour on Feb. 24, 2022.
The U.S. had been a strong backer of Ukraine’s fight when Joe Biden was still in the White House. But Washington’s position has been changing in the first month of the new Trump presidency.
Trump recently revealed that he’d spoken to Russian President Vladimir Putin and directed U.S. officials to begin talks with Russia on ending the war. Zelenskyy, who’d tried to get to the front of the line to meet with Trump, was informed of this after the fact.
Officials in the Trump administration have since met with some Russian counterparts in Saudi Arabia, but Ukraine was excluded from those talks.
U.S. allies are expressing alarm after President Donald Trump lashed out at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, calling him a ‘dictator with no elections,’ and accusing him of taking U.S. money to wage war on Russia.
Trump has since verbally attacked Zelenskyy and labelled him a “dictator without elections” — an apparent allusion to the fact that wartime conditions have delayed Ukrainian elections. Zelenskyy, in turn, said it appeared the U.S. leader was living in a Russian-made “disinformation space.”
Pushback to Zelenskyy’s pushback
Zelenskyy has faced criticism for pushing back against Trump.
“There needs to be a deep appreciation for what the American people and the American taxpayer, what President Trump did in his first term and what we’ve done since,” said Waltz, the national security adviser, at a White House news briefing.
“There’s some of the rhetoric coming out of Kyiv, frankly, and insults to President Trump [that] were unacceptable.”
Oleksiy Goncharenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker, saw Zelenskyy’s response as intemperate and inadvisable, given how much is riding on continued U.S. support for Ukraine.
“Everybody knows that President Trump hates to be criticized publicly, and we are not in the position to do this,” he told the Telegraph’s Daily T podcast. “What will we do without American support?” he asked.
Trump’s comments have nonetheless been shot down by some of Ukraine’s allies, including by French President Emmanuel Macron who said Thursday that Zelenskyy was a “legitimate” leader, having come to power via free elections, unlike Russia’s Putin.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke to Zelenskyy on Thursday and reiterated that “Canada will always stand in defence of Ukraine,” according to a readout from the call.
Trudeau also stressed that Ukraine must be part of any negotiations aimed at reaching a deal to end the war.
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