Lawmakers skeptical of Trump's Ukraine deal

Lawmakers in both parties are expressing skepticism of President Trump’s expected deal to share Ukraine’s mineral wealth, warning it will need a strong buy-in from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and a robust security guarantee from the United States.

GOP senators are divided over the emerging deal, with some hailing it as a big potential win and other Republicans calling for a stronger guarantee of Ukraine’s sovereignty.

Some conservatives, however, are warning against any security guarantee by the United States. They fear it would risk embroiling the nation in a future war.

A draft agreement of the potential deal to split management of Ukraine’s rare earth minerals and oil and natural gas reserves that circulated Thursday did not include a firm security guarantee for Ukraine, something that several Republican senators said would be critical to any viable peace deal.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), a leading advocate for U.S. support of the Ukrainian war effort, said a strong U.S. security guarantee would be “critical” to luring U.S. private investment to mineral and fossil fuel extraction within Ukraine’s borders.

He said if the security guarantees “are not pretty strong, to the extent the private sector is playing a role, why would they go there?”

“It’s going to be critical to our credibility about this being an enterprise that companies from the United States or Europe or wherever be allowed to participate in. They have to have those security guarantees,” he said.

Tillis cautioned that a “complicating factor” is that “a good portion of the minerals that we’re talking about are underneath the ground of where Russian soldiers are standing right now in the occupied area.”

Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), a prominent voice on national security issues, said he’s waiting to see whether Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials embrace the deal.

“I look forward to reviewing the final terms of the deal,” he said. “I want to hear from the Ukrainians.

“My sense is this was a mutually advantageous economic situation. That doesn’t fully answer for the Ukrainians their security concerns. It’s my hope that through diplomacy, the administration is persuading the Europeans to assume a significantly greater security presence and role there,” he said.

Zelensky is scheduled to visit the White House on Friday to sign the deal, which Trump has hailed as “a very big agreement.”

A bipartisan group of senators is scheduled to also meet with Zelensky.

Young said that the United States will need to provide assistance to European allies in the near and medium term to “deter further Russian aggression.”

He said, “it’s very important that we provide an effective deterrent,” arguing that past administrations have failed to send a clear message of deterrence to Russia and other adversaries.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) called the minerals agreement “a good step forward” but cautioned “there is going to have to be” a stronger U.S.-provided security guarantee.

“It’s going to be a solid financial arrangement for the Ukrainian people and the American taxpayer,” he said.

Yet other Republicans are pushing back on defense hawks within their conference by warning that the United States shouldn’t make any security commitments in Ukraine that could draw the nation into a direct armed conflict with Russia.

“I’m not for any kind of security deal with Ukraine. I’m for ending the war,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said. “I think the president’s doing a good job pushing towards an end to the war. The sooner, the better. The sooner we can stop the carnage, the better.

“I’m not for promising that we’re going to protect the world, or promising that we’re going to defend Ukraine,” he said.

Trump explicitly stopped short of promising to guarantee Ukraine’s sovereignty at the start of a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday.

The minerals deal would cover future licensing and infrastructure project and not override existing facilities, licenses and royalites already in effect.

The president said he was “not going to give security guarantees [for Ukraine] beyond very much, we’re going to have Europe do that.”

The terms of the draft deal reflect a more generous offer to Ukraine than Trump’s initial demand that it give the United States a $500 billion share of its rare earth minerals to pay for U.S. assistance already provided.

Zelensky rejected the initial offer, which was criticized by NATO allies such as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who described Trump’s gambit as “very egotistic” and “very self-centered.”

Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the latest proposal to share Ukraine’s mineral wealth appears improved from the proposal the Trump administration floated earlier this month.

“It sounds to me as if it’s been improved since what was described to me at the Munich Security Conference, in several different meetings,” he said.

“It sounded as what was initially presented [to Ukraine] was an extractive and poorly crafted agreement, and the modifications that have been made have moves it much more toward a joint investment in accessing critical minerals and funding the defense and reconstruction of Ukraine,” he said. “That seems much more acceptable to me, and sustainable.”

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), another member of the Foreign Relations panel, panned the emerging deal as largely meaningless, arguing that it doesn’t require any real obligations from either the United States or Ukraine.

“Have you seen the details of it? It looks like it’s a letter to each other. It’s not real, it’s just some words on a paper,” he said.

“When you talk about a minerals deal, that sounds like something that involves actual obligations from one party to the other. That does not look like what this is. This just looks like some vomit on a piece of paper that doesn’t mean anything,” he said.

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