U.S. President Donald Trump announced Tuesday night that his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky will visit the White House on Friday to sign a minerals deal.
According to Axios, the deal was struck on Tuesday after two weeks of tense negotiations. The Ukrainian cabinet will meet as soon as Wednesday to approve the deal before Zelensky travels to Washington later in the week.
The deal is designed to allow the US to tap some of Ukraine’s vast mineral wealth and boost the country’s post-war development. The Trump-Zelensky meeting comes after they had a public spat just last week, with the US president calling the Ukrainian a “dictator” and Zelensky claiming Trump is a victim of Russian disinformation.
Trump has argued that the mineral deal will generate billions of dollars in revenue for the US and help recover costs associated with US support for Ukraine in the war.
A source said Zelensky was able to negotiate a final plan that did not include a key U.S. requirement that they have rights to $500 billion in future revenues. The Financial Times was the first to report the US concession.
The draft agreement said the US wanted to keep Ukraine “free, sovereign and secure” but did not mention specific security guarantees.
The deal comes at a point when the US-Ukraine relationship appeared to be falling apart.
Zelensky expressed his opposition to the fact that the Trump administration had begun talks with Moscow on the future of the war without involving Ukraine and that it had taken key pressure points for Ukraine – such as the possibility of NATO membership – off the table without appearing to put similar pressure on Russia.
Trump, for his part, was furious that Zelensky rejected an initial version of the mineral deal. He stated that Ukraine had started the war and launched repeated personal attacks against Zelensky.
Ukrainian and U.S. officials said U.S. envoy Gen. Keith Kellogg played a key role in containing the crisis over the deal and preventing it from turning into a deeper rift between Trump and Zelensky.
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