Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will be in Washington to sign a framework of a deal granting the United States access to some of the country’s reserves of minerals critical to national security and the future of the economy.

Many details of the deal are still being ironed out as Zelenskyy tries to persuade President Donald Trump to provide security guarantees in exchange for access to the minerals in an agreement the White House sees as a financial boon.

Trump has positioned the deal as a way for America to recoup some of the costs taxpayers have taken on from supporting Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion.

“The previous administration put us in a very bad position, but we’ve been able to make a deal where we’re going to get the money back and a lot of money in the future,” Trump said on Wednesday.

But access to critical minerals has also become an increasingly important initiative for the U.S. government that has sought to increase cooperation with other countries with large reserves to increase production and refining in an industry dominated by China.

“Minerals have become sort of what oil and gas were at one point,” said Tim Johnson, professor of the practice in energy and the environment at Duke University. “When the U.S. was a net importer of petroleum, we talked about energy security and the vulnerabilities that came with reliance on key ingredients for our economy that come from elsewhere in the world. Well, minerals have become the same thing, especially as tensions with China have heated up over the last decade.”

The U.S. Department of the Interior has designated 50 minerals as being strategically critical and Ukraine has reserves containing more than 20 of them. The precious metals have all sorts of applications from clean energy to defense manufacturing and are in a wide range of consumer products.

Deposits of titanium — used for making aircraft wings, chemical processing and medical devices — are spread across Ukraine. It also has lithium, a key ingredient to battery technologies in electric vehicles and other devices. Ukraine also has large reserves of rare earths, a group of more than a dozen types of metals that are mostly untapped and used in high-tech sectors.

There are challenges ahead for whatever deal is ultimately finalized, as the data on Ukraine’s geology is decades old and it is unclear how easily the minerals can be mined and how profitable it will be. Mining is also an energy-intensive industry that will face issues after Ukraine’s infrastructure and power generations have been decimated by the war with Russia. Some of the areas thought to be rich in the minerals are also in parts of the country occupied by Russian troops.

The unknowns about Ukraine’s reserves and tremendously expensive costs to exploring and starting a mine in the face of continued security concerns with Russia might prove too much for mining companies to stomach.

Even with hurdles in place to get new mines and refineries running in Ukraine, the Trump administration still has incentives to move forward with a deal. The U.S. has been trying to expand its supply chain for critical minerals for nearly a decade as high-tech sectors of the economy became more reliant on them for products and China’s dominance of the global marketplace became a bigger national security risk.

Trump signed an executive order in 2017 to “ensure secure and reliable” supplies of critical minerals, leading to the Interior Department’s list of them vital to the nation’s goals. He signed another in 2020 ordering government agencies to address the United States’ reliance on “foreign adversaries” for critical minerals.

Former President Joe Biden sought to expand the supply chain for the critical minerals as part of his green energy push. Several of the minerals are crucial for electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels and other technology for cleaner energy sources, putting high demand on them around the world.

Trump has abandoned most of the Biden administration’s energy policies and has pushed to ramp up the production of fossil fuels, but has stayed committed to sourcing critical minerals.

The other issue at hand with securing more of the critical minerals is China’s dominance of the global marketplace for them. Reducing U.S. reliance on China’s supply has been a priority dating to Trump’s first administration as tensions with Beijing have risen.

A deal with Ukraine will not solve supply issues with China but might be a start to sourcing more supply and reducing U.S. dependence on an adversarial trading partner. A report released this month by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found the U.S. 50% to 100% of the critical minerals that have been deemed strategically critical.

Have a news tip? Contact Austin Denean at atdenean@sbgtv.com or at x.com/austindenean.