After conflicts tumultuous Between kyiv and Washington, as well as between European imperialist powers and the United States, Washington and kyiv signed a crucial agreement on minerals on Wednesday.
This agreement gives the United States important prerogatives in the exploitation of 57 mineral resources in Ukraine, including essential minerals, oil and gas. Shortly after signing the agreement on Thursday, the Trump administration announced that it had released $ 50 million in US military aid to Ukraine, ending this aid frost.
Although edulorized in relation to the neocolonial looting contract that the United States had presented in February, the agreement underlines the imperialist and predator of the war in Ukraine. Far from defending “democracy” or “freedom”, the conflict has always been anchored in the will of the imperialist powers to assert their control over the vast resources and wealth of the former Soviet Union, including Ukraine and Russia. This is why they deliberately provoked the reactionary invasion of Ukraine by the Putin regime, seeking to make it the starting point of an imperialist butchery of the whole region.
As has analysis The World Socialist Web Site In 2022, the war is underpinned by the raptor quest for the imperialist powers of terrestrial minerals essential to the functioning of the modern economy, in particular the production of micropuits and the development of the most advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence and electric vehicles. The vast majority of the extraction and treatment of essential minerals in the world today takes place in China, the main target of war preparations for American imperialism.
It is in this context that the resources of the former USSR, in particular Russia and Ukraine, have acquired strategic importance for the imperialist powers. In addition to oil, gas and gold, these two countries have large deposits of essential minerals such as lithium and titanium.
If during the Biden administration these predatory interests brought the name “human rights” and “democracy”, the Trump government openly assumes them as the driving force of its foreign policy.
Unlike the February project, which granted exclusive ownership of Ukrainian resources in the United States, the signed agreement provides for a “joint reconstruction and investment fund” with equal representation of the United States and Ukraine. During the first 10 years, all income will be intended for the “reconstruction” of Ukraine. But American companies will have the first right to invest and buy any project initiated by this fund.
Any new American military aid in Ukraine will be considered a contribution to this fund. For this agreement, the United States has given up requiring Ukraine that it “reimburses” all the military aid provided so far, an amount estimated at $ 67 billion. As in the past, Washington has refused to mention any “security guarantee” for Ukraine in the agreement.
Ukraine will have to devote 50 % of income from new licenses for extraction of oil, gas and minerals essential to financing its participation in this fund.
While the February project granted exclusive rights to the United States, the final agreement evokes possible membership of Ukraine to the EU and allows renegotiations “in good faith” to allow Ukraine to comply with its potential contractual obligations towards the EU.
The February project had caused the anger of the European imperialist powers, which fear being marginalized in the plunder of Ukraine. Like the American ruling class, the European bourgeoisie (in Germany, in France and in the United Kingdom in particular) has invested billions in the Ukrainian conflict to guarantee its “law” to the resources of the region. To compete with the American offer on the raw materials of Ukraine and guarantee deposits at the European bourgeoisie, the EU began negotiations in February on a “win-win partnership” with kyiv.
Despite a vague allusion to the interests of Germany, France and other European imperialist powers in the agreement, it was conceived as a successful effort to anticipate their maneuvers aimed at seizing the booty. The agreement stipulates that, “notwithstanding any new Ukraine legislation or any amendment to Ukraine’s law which could be adopted in the future, the United States and American companies will benefit from treatment which will be no less favorable than that required by this Agreement”.
-This “treatment” guarantees that there will be no taxes, prices, rights, deductions or deductions of any kind on the profits made by American companies in the extraction of raw materials of Ukraine.
In theory, Ukraine retains the property and control of its resources and can decide who will extract what and where. But, from the point of view of the working class, this “independence” is a fiction. Ukraine is led by a criminal oligarchy which, like its Russian counterpart, comes from the destruction of the Soviet Union by the Stalinist bureaucracy, carried out in hand with the imperialist powers. Since then, the oligarchs, in Ukraine as in Russia, have raised huge amounts of wealth by looting state goods and selling the country’s resources to imperialist countries.
Thus, because of its entire socio-economic basis and its history, the Ukrainian oligarchy is intrinsically linked to the imperialist powers, between which it constantly maneuver and on behalf of which it sent hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to the butcher’s shop. Although the agreement can offer oligarchs a basis to divert part of the profits from the extraction of raw materials for the purposes of personal enrichment, it actually constitutes the pseudo-legal foundation of a neocolonial exploitation of the country’s resources.
As in many past colonial incursions, its objective base is particularly precarious. A study conducted by the Canadian SECDEV NGO in 2022 estimated the value of Ukraine critical mineral deposits at $ 12,000 billion, figures taken since NATO politicians. However, the vast majority of these deposits remain unexploited, and many experts doubt the reality of this alleged “manna of critical minerals” in Ukraine.
Javier Blas, columnist specializing in energy and raw materials at Bloomberg, noted on Twitter/X:
This is not the first time that the United States has been wrong on the geology of a war zone. In 2010, the United States announced that it had discovered $ 1,000 billion in unexploited mineral deposits in Afghanistan, some of which are essential for electric cars, such as lithium. It was a pure illusion … Does Ukraine have mineral riches? Yes. It has large deposits of iron and coal ore, which are not strategically important worldwide. Before the war, Ukraine barely produced more iron ore than countries like the United States, Canada and Sweden … But the main thing is that Ukraine has no commercially exploitable deposits. Almost systematically, the documents found online confuse small accumulations of minerals containing rare earths with a commercial mine. It’s not the same thing.
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In addition, it is estimated that around 50 % of Ukraine’s mineral resources are now in territories controlled by Russia. They undoubtedly occupy a central place in the current negotiations between the United States and Russia.
The ravages of war will further complicate the extraction of raw materials. After more than three years of war, Ukraine is today the most undermined country in the world. According to estimates, at the end of 2024, between 25 and 30 % of the country’s territory, or around 174,000 square kilometers, are contaminated by millions of land and other explosives. At least 413 people have lost their lives because of land mines since 2022. Intensive mining has already seriously compromised Ukrainian agriculture, which has lost arable land of an area equivalent to that of Belgium. It will inevitably create important obstacles to the extraction of raw materials of all kinds.
Whatever the immediate result of this agreement and subsequent negotiations of the Trump administration with the Kremlin, workers must consider it as a severe warning regarding the character of the events taking place. The war in Ukraine, with its hundreds of thousands of deaths and its millions of wounded, is only the initial stage of a new imperialist sharing of the world which emanates from the insoluble crisis of the capitalist system as a whole and is accelerated by the decline of American imperialism.
It can only be stopped by the intervention of the international working class, which must be unified on the basis of a socialist program and mobilized to oppose the ruling classes of all countries.
(Article published in English on May 2, 2025)
