Name: What Does the US-Ukraine Minerals Deal Mean For The War? | BBC Newscast
Uploaded: 2025-05-03T00:12:17.000Z
Duration: 35 min
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The US and Ukraine have finally sealed their long-awaited deal on access to Ukraine's natural resources, and it is being interpreted by some as a win for President Zelensky of Ukraine over Donald Trump.

And what does that mean for the rest of the peace process in Ukraine?

We will discuss all of that on this latest episode of the BBC's daily news podcast, Newscast.

What does it mean for the relationship between the US and Ukraine?

And what does it mean for the wider process of negotiating an end to the fighting after Russia's invasion?

The person who can tell us, or at least help us work it out, is the BBC's international editor, Jeremy Bowen.

I've not actually had a chance to read the text of this whole deal yet, which is something I usually like to do.

Do you want to just break down the key elements that I'll find there?

The whole deal, when you read it, you'll see that it's in rather legalistic language.

There's a lot of whereases and things like that in it.

However, I think main points, certainly as presented by the Ukrainians, I've got a list here, so I'm going to be reading bits of them.

The Ukrainian economy minister who signed, who's also the first deputy prime minister, Ulia Sevrydenko, this is her summary of it.

She said, this is a good deal for Ukraine.

Full ownership and control will remain with Ukraine.

National property, she said, is protected, i.e.

The deal, she made this point, does not mention any debt repayments by Ukraine to the USA, though when I went through it just a few minutes ago, I did notice that there's also a clause in it that says that if the Americans give more, after the deal comes into force, give them more military equipment, then the value of that will be included in the American contribution to what's going on.

It's not like it's all going to be coming for free.

There's also the point that she keeps saying, in big capital letters, new licenses, new enterprises.

In other words, there's no element of backdating it, because to start with, in the earlier versions of it, and the things Trump was saying, there were suggestions that he might retroactively want to take over the entire Ukrainian nuclear industry.

They've got a lot of nuclear power stations dating back to the Soviet times.

They are saying that they managed to get a good deal, and I suppose you might ask, is that because Zelensky actually stood up to Trump?

He didn't get into a crouch position and do as he was told, perhaps, but I think what it does do, the big absence, from the Ukrainian point of view, is there are still no overt security guarantees, and that's what they wanted in return for some kind of deal like this.

So their hope would be that this actually means that Trump and America are somehow committed to the long haul, to their existence as an independent country.

Well, because you can imagine that if suddenly they weren't fully independent, or if Russia took over bigger parts of it in some sort of future deal, or maybe if they scored military victories, would the Americans make deals with the Russians about rare earths, many of which actually are in areas which are in the war zone, or even in areas which are now controlled by the Russian military?

Would the Americans make deals with Moscow about that?

They won't necessarily say, I'm sorry, we had a deal with your government.

So I don't really necessarily buy this argument that just by investing, it's almost like a security guarantee.

My experience in many wars over many years is that when the balloon goes up, one thing that you always see are multinational companies, including American ones, doing all they can to get their expats out and save ASAP.

You know, they don't suddenly put down their tools and pick up weapons and become a militia, nothing like that.

But you said there isn't an explicit security guarantee.

But the fact that America envisages using this fund to pay itself back for military stuff that it sends to Ukraine in future, isn't that an implicit security guarantee?

That's effectively the White House saying, yeah, we're prepared to keep arming Ukraine, it just it won't be for free.

I mean, they've said if they send more weapons, they haven't guaranteed to send more weapons as part of this.

But certainly what it does, it binds the Americans into Ukraine and its future, and the Trump administration, and their successors, because just developing the enormous infrastructure required to get at this is not going to happen in the next four years.

I mean, apart from the fact that war's going on, think how long it takes to dig a coal mine.

I mean, to exploit these rare earths and minerals in the way that they want to, will take an investment of billions of dollars.

And that's another reason, in fact, why the Ukrainians are pleased the Americans are involved, because they haven't got billions of dollars, the Americans have.

And also, it's interesting that we've just had a situation where the US has done a deal, the minerals deal that kind of, okay, you could argue about it, but it's sort of is a pro-Ukrainian thing to do, as opposed to a pro-Russian thing to do.

And then it looks like US-Ukrainian relations are improving.

But then Trump has to sort of personally subvert all of that by reminding everyone listening to that news channel that he thinks Ukraine is the weaker partner.

So it's sort of two steps towards Ukraine, and then another big step towards Russia.

And I think one thing that we've learned by now is that the thing that Trump respects is, you know, the big guy with a big wallet, and lots of power.

And that's why I think that even though they may have done this deal, it doesn't mean to say that he does not want, as a priority, to re-establish good relations with Moscow.

Because if he's in the world of deal making and natural resources, Russia, the biggest country in the world, has got colossal underexploited natural resources.

So you can see the dollar signs in his mind when it comes to all of that.

He said that if there was normalization, then sanctions lifted, then they could do deals, they'd have direct flights, there would be all kinds of opportunities for American business.

He's addressed this in the course of the past couple of months.

One thing to remember on the historical point, Adam, is that, you know, America, in the past, has always, as often, I should say, demanded the repayment of war debts.

Britain paid off its last installment of its Second World War debts to both the United States and Canada in 2006.

They keep accounts and they want their money back.

And just in terms of the big Ukraine-Russia picture, or checklist, as it were, this is a tick for the resources deal.

But the temporary 30-day ceasefire that Ukraine and the US say they want, and the permanent end to the fighting, which, well, kind of a big chunk of the world wants, both those boxes are still very much unticked.

And I think that both, if you look at the way that Zelensky and Putin have been playing it, both, I think, want to prolong this process and then make sure, engineer things, so that the other side gets blamed if it all falls apart and Trump decides to walk away from trying to make peace here because he's got other things on his plate.

So that's the game that they've been playing.

You know, one thing also that's interesting, actually, is that they've got the big Second World War commemorations coming up in Moscow, I think, on the 9th of May.

Putin's invited all kinds of people like that.

I've been doing some good stuff on this, following it.

There is a debate there about whether or not Ukraine should try and attack that parade in Moscow at the time.

And there are people in the Ukrainian media saying, legitimate target, why not?

And President Putin has suggested a three-day ceasefire around that time.

Because, you know, what in Ukraine they're saying is that he'll want to do is bring all the air defences they've got all around Moscow to make sure that they can't get drones through.

So there is a bit of a debate going on in Ukraine about whether or not they accept that particular proposal and whether they try and exploit.

I don't think they will, frankly, because it would be seen as such an act of aggression.

Oh, so Putin's offer of a three-day ceasefire around about the Victory Day celebrations, as they call it in Russia, is actually for a ceasefire over the skies of Moscow, really, ultimately, as opposed to a ceasefire in Eastern and Southern Ukraine, really.

This is what is being, this is what the Chatterati in Ukraine are saying at the moment.

Now, on a totally different note, we're doing another episode this Bank Holiday weekend of Old Newscast, where we go back to a big event from the recent past.

And this weekend is the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

What were you doing as a strip of a lad that day?

Well, I was a young BBC reporter and I wasn't on the story because I was working in Washington.

I still remember my absolute, I mean, having grown up in the Cold War, I was 29 in 1989.

Having grown up and having as a, you know, when I was a BBC trainee journalist, they took us to Berlin.

And we went into what was West Berlin, the West Side, and we traveled over to through Checkpoint Charlie, to what was an absolutely different world.

Different, the city looked different, you could still in the ATC damage from the Second World War.

We went into West Berlin on the on the British military train that they ran from Hanover every day to ensure under the four power agreement that they that they had, they kept open the rail links into and all the prices on that train were set at I think 1946 levels.

So you could get lunch on the same kind of menu, probably half a grapefruit and brown Winsor soup or something for the equivalent of whatever it would have cost in a brandy and soda for whatever it would have cost in the late 1940s, all part of the status quo for Berlin.

But in the follow on from that, I spent quite a lot of time after that and things like the Romanian Revolution, the collapse of the Soviet Union.