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The US Treasury secretary has defended Donald Trump’s push for an agreement with Ukraine to develop its natural resources and significant minerals, saying the plan would fuel postwar growth within the country and didn’t involve any coercive economic pressure.
Scott Bessent’s comments in an op-ed for the Financial Times come as Trump administration officials are attempting to clinch what they claim is an economic partnership with Kyiv as a part of their broader diplomatic push to broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials have thus far rejected US demands for such an agreement, but US officials are applying intense pressure on Kyiv of their push for a deal.
Officials in Kyiv consider that Trump’s onslaught against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy this week, describing him as a dictator and suggesting Ukraine, not Russia, had began the war, are ways of strong-arming Kyiv right into a mineral deal.
Within the op-ed, Bessent laid out among the details of the US proposal. He said Ukraine’s revenue from “natural resources, infrastructure and other assets” can be “allocated to a fund focused on the long-term reconstruction and development of Ukraine where the USA could have economic and governance rights in those future investments”.
Nevertheless, Bessent didn’t say how much of the proceeds from mineral extraction can be allocated to the fund or how much can be paid out to the US. Trump has presented the mineral deal as a way of ensuring Ukraine pays back previous US military aid.
Probably the most recent draft agreement, dated Friday and seen by the Financial Times, calls for a reconstruction investment fund during which the US “maintains 100 per cent financial interest”.
Ukraine would contribute 50 per cent of the fund’s revenues through mineral resources until its contribution reached $500bn. That figure, described as unacceptable by Ukrainian officials, is being negotiated.
Ukraine’s speaker of parliament Ruslan Stefanchuk said on Saturday that Kyiv could begin finalising the deal starting Monday.
One other Ukrainian official stressed that it will be signed just once Kyiv had been given security guarantees.
In his op-ed, Bessent said that the agreement would come with “high standards of transparency, accountability, corporate governance, and legal frameworks essential to draw the robust private investment for postwar growth in Ukraine” and America’s involvement “would go away no room for corruption and insider deals”.
The US Treasury secretary travelled to Ukraine earlier this month on his first international trip to pitch the deal to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president.
While US officials including Mike Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser, have said they consider a deal is close, Ukrainian officials are more guarded.
“The draft on the table now needs more work,” said an individual involved in negotiations. “We see there many obligations of Ukraine and really weak things [offered] from the American side, so the draft, as for today, just isn’t able to be accepted on the president’s level.”
Negotiations went early into the morning for the third day and can proceed on Saturday and possibly into Sunday.
Zelenskyy has said that Bessent’s original proposal was not in Ukraine’s interest, because it demanded 50 per cent of the rights to the country’s rare earth and significant minerals in exchange for past military assistance, and didn’t contain any offers of future assistance.
Senior Ukrainians officials said that they had spent the past week drawing up a counterproposal, which they discussed with the US special envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, in Kyiv on Thursday and Friday.
Zelenskyy wants the Trump administration to offer security guarantees in a brand new proposal before they conform to sign on.
Within the op-ed, Bessent said the terms of the deal would “be sure that countries that didn’t contribute to the defence of Ukraine’s sovereignty won’t have the ability to profit from its reconstruction or these investments”.
Bessent also suggested the US was not attempting to seize control of Ukraine’s natural resources coercively. “Let’s even be clear as to what this just isn’t. America wouldn’t be taking ownership of physical assets in Ukraine. Nor wouldn’t it be saddling Ukraine with more debt. This kind of economic pressure, while deployed by other global actors, wouldn’t advance American nor Ukrainian interests,” he wrote.
