Ukraine’s Cabinet is expected to recommend on Wednesday that the deal be signed, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private deliberations. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is planning to travel to the US Friday to seal the agreement, the people said.
“I hear that he’s coming on Friday,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Tuesday. “Certainly it’s okay with me, if you’d like to, and he would like to sign it together with me. And I understand that’s a big deal.”
Trump has pressured Zelenskyy to accept the deal, first presented by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in Kyiv earlier this month. But the Ukrainian president rejected earlier versions, saying the US was demanding too much from his country.
The deal came together after US dropped the demand for Kyiv to commit to paying $500 billion from resource extraction to a fund as a form of repayment for US aid, one person said. The framework agreement would create a joint US-Ukraine fund to manage future revenues from the country’s natural resources, according to the person.
The latest version of the deal still doesn’t spell out specific security guarantees, the people said, though Ukraine sees it as a starting point toward that possibility. Those have been a key priority for Ukraine, whose leaders have been alarmed by Trump’s repeated broadsides against Zelenskyy and US officials’ argument that he shares the blame for the invasion.
US officials have said that binding Ukraine to the US through economic ties would provided a de facto security shield. A detailed agreement is expected to be worked out later. The Financial Times reported the accord earlier Tuesday.
“The substance here seems to be less than meets the eye, and it appears to be, by contrast, intensely political,” said Justin Logan, director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato institute. He said the deal allows Trump to “market a political win” at home while Zelenskyy can ease recent strains with the US.
The deal may also offer Trump a way to encourage buy-in from his supporters for continued backing for Ukraine, particularly if Washington needs Congress to approve additional aid for Ukraine if negotiations with Russia continue to drag on. Ukraine still relies on US and European allies for weapons and ammunition.
Both sides have been locked for days in intense negotiations over the agreement that the US administration sees as integral to its plan to broker a ceasefire in Russia’s three-year war on Ukraine. Trump’s decision to send top aides to negotiate first with Russia produced tensions in the relationship, which boiled over after the US president called Zelenskyy a “dictator.”
Ukraine wants to invest in the new fund together with the US on a 50-50 basis, Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said on Monday. The fund would include future income from state enterprises, as well as from the extraction of raw materials, he added.
Trump has said he wanted the equivalent of $500 billion from rare earths, which are mainly used in high-strength magnets. But despite reports of $10 trillion in mineral deposits, Ukraine has no major rare-earth reserves that are internationally recognized as economically viable.
Ukraine does have some commercial mines of critical minerals such as titanium and gallium, which while important aren’t likely to be worth the sums Trump envisages.
Even if Ukraine does have any economically viable deposits, the West still has a bigger challenge to overcome. Most countries are forced to send the rare earths they mine to be refined in China as it dominates the processing of these materials.
