“Ukraine Has Scorched Earth; What It Doesn’t Have Is Rare Earths”

In recent weeks, discussions have emerged around President Donald Trump’s proposal for a deal that would grant the US exclusive access to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals in exchange for continued military aid. Last weekend, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy rejected the proposal, even though US officials had pitched the deal as an integral part of lasting peace in resolving the multi-year war that has killed hundreds of thousands.

Trump and top officials have articulated that the US wants a guarantee of $500 billion worth of Ukraine’s estimated trillion dollars of rare earth wealth.

Financial Times noted last week that Ukraine’s rejection of the US proposal as follows: 

Zelenskyy wants American and European security guarantees to be tied directly to any deal on the mineral reserves, according to four people familiar with the US-Ukraine negotiations. He is also keen for other countries, including EU states, to be involved in future natural resource exploitation.

But the deal proposed by Trump and delivered by Bessent only referenced the US getting Ukrainian resources in exchange for past military assistance, and did not contain any proposals for similar future assistance, according to a person familiar with the document.

If the FT’s report is accurate, the Trump administration may attempt to recoup US losses from the war by seeking a substantial stake in Ukraine’s rare earth minerals deposits. 

However, some remain skeptical that Ukraine’s rare earth mineral deposits are worth a trillion or more… 

“What Ukraine has is scorched earth; what it doesn’t have is rare earths. Surprisingly, many people — not least, US President Donald Trump — seem convinced the country has a rich mineral endowment. It’s a folly,” Bloomberg’s Javier Blas penned in an op-ed on Wednesday. 

More from Blas questioning Ukraine’s rare earths deposits:

I was puzzled. To the best of my knowledge, Ukraine has no significant rare-earth deposits other than small scandium mines. The US Geological Survey, an authority on the matter, doesn’t list the country as holding any reserves. Neither does any other database commonly used in the mining business.

Simply put, “follow the money” doesn’t work here. At best, the value of all the world’s rare-earth production rounds to $15 billion a year — emphasis on “a year.” That’s equal to the value of just two days of global oil output. Even if Ukraine had gigantic deposits, they wouldn’t be that valuable in geo-economic terms.

Say that Ukraine was able, as if by magic, to produce 20% of the world’s rare earths. That would equal to about $3 billion annually. To reach the $500 billion mooted by Trump, the US would need to secure 150-plus years of Ukrainian output. Pure nonsense

However, Blas acknowledged that his analysis could be wrong and that Ukraine may, in fact, have substantial deposits.

He outlined two possible explanations for this:

I see two possibilities: that Trump is right — and I’m very wrong — and Ukraine has, in fact, lots of rare earths; or that he misspoke, and rather than “rare earths” he meant other minerals. Or perhaps he took the small potential of a single element — scandium2 — and extrapolated.

Let’s explore the second option, because at least it would make some sense. While Ukraine doesn’t have commercial rare-earth deposits, it does have mines housing other minerals. Before its war with Russia, Ukraine produced significant amounts of iron ore and coal. Neither are strategic, but the country had been making decent money from both. Problem? Some mines lie now in territory conquered by Russia.

Maybe Trump conflated “rare earths” with the much broader concept of “critical minerals.” Of the latter, Ukraine has some commercial mines of titanium and gallium. Both are fairly valuable and have some strategic importance, but then again, controlling either wouldn’t alter geo-economics. And they certainly aren’t worth Trump’s expressed $500 billion.

Still, the American president steadfastly referred to rare earths; not once, but several times. So then, perhaps he knows something the commodity world doesn’t. But I found no credible source that says Ukraine is brimming with reserves.

Every document someone has pointed out to me regurgitates the same conspiracy-theory claims found on the blogosphere. They tend to mistake accumulations of some rare-earth-bearing minerals as equating with a commercial mine. Many highlight the Novopoltavske deposit, discovered by the Soviets in 1970, as a potential source. While tiny amounts of rare earths are present there, digging them out seems impossible — hence why the site remains an unproductive deposit rather than a mine more than 50 years after its discovery. The Ukrainian government has described Novopoltavske as “relatively difficult” to mine and said that any rare-earth yield would be “off balance,” meaning that it’s not economical to exploit them at current prices. Worse, the mineralogy goes against it: The host source is a mineral that makes extracting the elements very hard.

The worst of the pamphlets claiming Ukraine has a rare-earths cache bears the North Atlantic Treaty Organization imprint and has been widely shared as the “Trump-is-right” proof. It was produced in December 2024 by the NATO Energy Security Centre of Excellence, based in Lithuania. Although affiliated with the military alliance, bearing its name and logo, the entity and its counterparts are autonomous bodies outside the command chain. The document is provocative: “Ukraine emerges as a key potential supplier of rare earth metals such as titanium, lithium, beryllium, manganese, gallium, uranium…” The list should ring every alarm. Anyone with a passing knowledge of chemistry knows none of those minerals are rare earths.

Why NATO’s imprint is attached to the report, which appears devoid of basic fact-checking, is beyond comprehension. A spokesperson told me the views reflected those of the author rather than NATO — something the document doesn’t say.

If that’s the source Trump’s advisers used to convince him of Ukraine’s rare-earth riches, it would be depressing — global politics based on copy and paste. It would suit the Kafkaesque year of 2025 well.

And this is not the first time Washington has used geology in a war zone to justify empire-building. 

Blas noted, ”Back in 2010, the US announced it had discovered $1 trillion of untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, including some crucial for electric-car batteries, like lithium. The Pentagon went as far as describing Afghanistan as “the Saudi Arabia of lithium.”"