WASHINGTON — President Trump expressed interest Monday in tying continued aid to Ukraine to the US getting access to rare earth minerals from the war-torn country.
“We’re looking to do a deal with Ukraine where they’re going to secure what we’re giving them with their rare earth and other things,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, adding that he wants a “guarantee” in exchange for US money.
“We’re handing them money hand over fist. We’re giving them equipment. [The] European [Union] is not keeping up with us.”
Trump, 78, had previously vowed to end the three-year-old war between Russia and Ukraine in the first days of his administration.
Ukraine is one of the largest rare earth mineral suppliers in the world, and has the largest titanium reserves in Europe.
The country also boasts deposits of lithium, beryllium, manganese, gallium, uranium, zirconium, graphite, apatite, fluorite, and nickel, per the World Economic Forum.
Russian forces have already taken parts of Eastern Ukraine that had historically provided the rest of the country with key minerals, notably much of the coal-supplying Donbas region.
But other parts of Ukraine, including the Dnieper River basin that runs through the center of the country and the Carpathian Mountains in the West, have massive supply of minerals and natural gas under Kyiv’s control.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had expressed willingness to provide minerals in exchange for the US continuing to give military aid in its war against Russia, according to a readout provided after Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) visited Ukraine last year.
“President Zelensky was excited about and was committed to obtaining a strategic agreement with the US regarding the more than a trillion dollars-worth of rare earth minerals owned by Ukraine and expressed a commitment to create a working group with the US to make this happen,” the senators said in a joint statement in August.
If Europe finally stood up for itself we wouldn’t even have this problem. My president is one of the worst offenders for being a coward and trying to appease a bloodthirsty psychopath that is trying to destroy our freedom. Biggest economy in Europe. Dedicated 100 billion for Defense a few years ago. Whatever happened to that money?
We could be a major global player militarily. But we are too stupid, or rather our politicians are too stupid. And too many old people vote vs too few young.
We could deter Russia fully on our own. We have the money. And we have over 500 million people.
Because then the US would not been able to coup Ukraine in 14.
Europe doesn’t need to be a “major global player militarily”, no one wants to attack Europe. And the last thing the world needs is German re-armament, we saw how that ended the last time. Russia doesn’t need to be “deterred”, Europe just needs to learn to get along with them like normal neighbors and stop attacking and demonizing Russia while being a bunch of stuck up racists and American bootlickers. It doesn’t matter how much money you have if you don’t have sovereignty. So long as Europe continues to allow itself to be a collection of US vassal states things will only get worse.
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Raging homophobia that always casually comes out has to be my favorite lib trope. Really shows how libs don’t actually believe in anything they peddle. 🤡
Exactly. I see they’ve been banned but please leave their reply. Don’t remove it, this way everyone can see their hypocrisy and hate on full display.
They deleted it themselves. lol. Fascists being cowards, are we surprised?
Aww… Welp, at least they feel embarrassed. That means there might be hope for them yet. I like to think we believe in rehabilitation here. They can make a new account and come back when they’ve learned not to be such a dumbass.
Lots of countries prefer to get along with Russia rather than the US regime.
Modern Germany is one of the most pro-Nazi countries in the world. We have a Nazi party polling at 25%, we arrest journalists and people who protest against genocide and war. We run cover at the UN for a fascist apartheid ethnostate engaged in a brutal, decades long illegal occupation, that is constantly bombing their neighbors, that specifically targets hospitals, doctors, ambulances, schools, food aid, and journalists, bulldozes homes, shops and even streets, and is hellbent on ethnic cleansing. We sell them weapons and collaborate with their intelligence agents to help suppress speech, murder resistance fighters and even simply people who speak out against them.
On top of that we give huge amounts of weapons and billions of euros for free to the most corrupt regime in Europe, probably in the whole world, a neonazi police state that worships WW2 Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators who brutally butchered hundreds of thousands of Poles and Jews, not to mention their own people. This is a regime which for the last ten years has imprisoned, tortured and murdered dissidents and journalists, which bombs civilians in the middle of the day going to the market, bombs schools, and tortures, rapes and murders civilians for speaking the wrong language.
We unconditionally support this regime that has cancelled elections indefinitely, imposed martial law, is directly involved in trafficking weapons and human beings, regularly organizes terrorist attacks against civilians, and drags its own people off the streets to die untrained, pointlessly and gruesomely in a filthy trench for the profits of oligarchs and Blackrock and every other vulture that they are literally selling the entire country off to while the leaders of the regime put aside a nice nest egg for themselves in offshore accounts, in mansions and luxury cars and shell companies around the world.
It seems Germany has learned absolutely nothing from its past (except how to hide its Nazism under liberal phraseology). It continues to find itself consistently on the wrong side of history, from being one of the primary participants in the rape of Yugoslavia to aiding and abetting two fascist regimes, one of which is committing genocide and one which would have if they were not stopped by Russia. The bloodthirsty psychopaths trying to destroy our freedom and the freedom of everyone else in the world are right here, in Europe and the US, in Brussels, Berlin, London, Paris, Warsaw and Washington, not in Russia or wherever else the regime media - die gleichgeschalteten Medien, to use a more fitting phrase - tells you.
Wishing death and damnation on a whole nation of people to hell based solely on their place of birth? Pretty sure that constitutes as genocidal rhetoric.
What did Russia do to you? Oh that’s right they liberated the death camps that gemany used for slave labor. Then they occupied half your country… to keep it from returning to nazism. They probably killed your granddaddy… who was a nazi.
You hate russia because they are the only ones who actually are committed to destroying nazis and do more than just talk about destroying fascism.
Kinda par for the course for a lot of libs right.
They wish death and destruction upon entire ethnic groups living under “dictatorships” because they all deserve it and either are ‘subhuman orcs’ or ‘brainwashed yellow robots’ amirite (despite not having “the power to vote for their governments”).
But when others condemn those from the supposed liberal democratic states, all of a sudden it’s “not my fault, I didn’t vote for this”.
The animal farm movie propaganda did proved that they direct the blame on eastern European collectively for communist takeover.
Marshal Zhukov was right when he said: “We have liberated Europe from fascism, and they will never forgive us for it”.
I mean I hate Russia for occupying my country when we were ready to have the best possible version of socialism (Czechoslovakia, 1968) and I’m 100% convinced Putin needs to die no matter what, but I still hate the US or Germany more.
Solidarność in Poland also claimed to want “a better version of socialism” and look how that turned out. Things are not always what they are marketed to you as. I don’t know if the USSR acted exactly correctly in 1968, but i also don’t know that they didn’t prevent (or i should say delay by a couple of decades) the liberalization and destruction of socialism in Czechoslovakia by doing what they did. Some would argue that what was happening was an anti-communist coup, or at best an early version of Glasnost and Perestroika, and that the Soviets were right to put a stop to it.
Now personally i don’t know enough about the exact history of that event to say one way or another. I need to read more about it. What i do know is that it doesn’t seem right to hate an entire country for what a previous government did, particularly when that same country made great sacrifices to liberate your country from fascism.
Just out of curiosity, would you say that Yugoslavia had a better version of socialism than the USSR? Because they had a different model to the Soviet one, but theirs also didn’t survive long after the USSR fell. So let’s say Czechoslovakia did manage to achieve “the perfect version of socialism”. It was not a very big country, do you think that this version of socialism could have survived, isolated from the rest of the socialist bloc, let alone after the socialist bloc fell?
As for Putin, well we’re all going to die someday, and so is he. The question is: who will take over afterwards? Do you think it would be a communist, an even worse reactionary, or a liberal ready to sell out Russia to the West?
Another lib with an oral fixation. Someone needs to analyse you guys.
What the hell is the AfD then?
Also, German philosopher Hans-Georg Moeller explains: Guilt Pride: A German Vanity Project Conquering the World
That was an excellent video. It put into words something that always bothered me but i could never quite express or even fully comprehend myself. As someone who immigrated to Germany and experienced first hand how the topic is addressed in schools but who always felt like an outsider looking in, there was always something obscene about how they almost seemed to take a kind of perverse pride in how they deal with their past. When the real lesson of what they did should have been “we should learn how this happened and never allow this to happen again to anyone anywhere”, instead it became “look how good we are at admitting our guilt, and because we did the worst thing ever now we are experts in recognizing when someone is doing bad things or not”. Yet when push came to shove they immediately sided with the genociders over the victims, which laid bare their insincerity for all to see.
Of course this doesn’t apply to all Germans, i have German friends who have always been sincere about this, who are ardent anti-fascists, who made an effort to really educate themselves and not just engage in this performative virtue signaling and who see the atrocities that our government is supporting in occupied Palestine and are disgusted and appalled. But our institutions at this point are full on pro-genocide, and they’re only getting worse and more repressive.
And when the SMO started, they immediately sided with the guys waving the fascist flags.
I wouldn’t have believed it if someone said it to me before 2022 but now i truly believe that the German ruling class has never actually accepted their defeat at the hands of Russia and were just itching to get a second chance to do what they failed to do in WW2. They were just giddy at seeing German tanks kill Russians again. Nothing else explains the sheer bloodthirsty enthusiasm with which they have thrown themselves into this new anti-Russia crusade. And so far, they have partly succeeded, as just like last time Nazis have managed to take over the Baltics and a large part of Ukraine. But they will lose again all the same. Because last time they made it to Stalingrad and the gates of Moscow, whereas this time they couldn’t even make it to Kursk.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Lmao, this is amazing
Lol lmao even.