US and Ukraine sign long-awaited minerals deal

The US and Ukraine have signed a long-awaited minerals deal that will see the two countries share revenues from Ukraine’s natural resources and establish an investment fund for the country’s post-war reconstruction, the US Treasury Department announced on Wednesday.

In a statement, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the agreement would help “accelerate Ukraine’s economic recovery” and signalled to Russia that the US was committed to a “peace process centred on a free, sovereign, and prosperous Ukraine over the long term”.

“No state or person who financed or supplied the Russian war machine will be allowed to benefit from the reconstruction of Ukraine”, Bessent said.

Writing on X from Washington, where she had travelled on Wednesday to sign the deal, Ukrainian Economy Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said the fund it established would attract “global investment into our country”, with the investment fund for Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction to be jointly managed by both Washington and Kyiv on a 50/50 basis.

The agreement is expected to grant the US significant access to Ukraine’s natural resources — including critical minerals, oil and gas — but Svyrydenko stressed that Ukraine would retain “full ownership and control” of its deposits, with Kyiv determining “what and where to extract”.

While Bessent said the deal recognised the “significant financial and material support” provided to Ukraine by the US since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion three years ago, Svyrydenko made clear that it would not place Kyiv under any debt obligations for prior military aid — despite US President Donald Trump’s previous insistence that Ukraine repay Washington in full.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said the agreement would help Ukraine “attract substantial resources for reconstruction, kickstart economic growth, and receive the latest technologies from our partners and a strategic investor, the United States”.

Although the deal is not thought to contain any explicit security guarantees, Trump said the US presence in Ukraine would “keep a lot of bad actors out of the country, or certainly out of the area where we’re doing the digging”.

The agreement is now to be submitted to Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, for ratification.

The Trump administration had been negotiating with Ukraine for months for an agreement to give the US a share of profits from future Ukrainian investment projects, particularly relating to raw materials and minerals.

The two sides were believed to be on the cusp of signing a deal in February, but the agreement was cancelled following Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s ill-fated Oval Office meeting with Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance.