Zelensky expected to visit White House amid push for minerals deal

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is expected to visit the White House on Friday as Kyiv and the Trump administration work to finalize an agreement on critical minerals.

President Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he heard Zelensky was visiting on Friday, "and certainly it's OK with me if he'd like to."

Trump a day earlier had signaled Zelensky could be in Washington this week or next week to sign off on a critical minerals deal between the two countries.

The Trump administration has been involved in talks with Ukraine about gaining access to the country’s critical minerals amid talks to end the Russia-Ukraine war. U.S. officials have suggested the deal would benefit Ukraine because it would create a greater incentive for the U.S. to provide security guarantees for Kyiv.

The Associated Press reported that Ukrainian officials said they had the framework of a deal in place with the U.S.

Ukrainian officials say Kyiv has agreed on a framework for an economic deal with US that they hope will keep aid coming.

"Without the United States and its money and its military equipment, this war would have been over in a very short period of time," Trump told reporters on Tuesday.

Monday marked three years since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine after amassing troops on the border and demanding a ban on Ukraine ever joining NATO. The invasion took place nearly a decade after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.

Trump has become increasingly critical of Zelensky as he pushes for an end to the war. Trump last week raised eyebrows when he called Zelensky a “dictator without elections,” claimed he was doing a “terrible job” and suggested he was responsible for the start of the war.

“I don’t think he’s very important to be at meetings, to be honest with you,” Trump said Friday. “He makes it very hard to make deals.”

But Trump, in a post on his social media site Truth Social on Tuesday, said a minerals deal would recoup “Tens of Billions of Dollars and Military Equipment sent to Ukraine,” while also helping Ukraine’s economy grow.

Ukrainian officials have reportedly agreed to the terms of a final deal, The Financial Times and The Washington Post reported.

A final version of the agreement, dated Monday and viewed by the FT, describes a fund into which Ukraine would contribute 50 percent of proceeds from the “future monetisation” of state-owned mineral resources, including oil and gas and associated logistics. The fund would invest in projects in Ukraine.

The deal excludes mineral resources that already contribute to Ukrainian government coffers, the FT reports, meaning it would not cover the existing activities of Ukraine’s largest gas and oil producers, Naftogaz or Ukrnafta.

The deal does not address the size of the U.S. stake in the fund and the terms of “joint ownership” deals, the FT reported.

The text of the agreement also reportedly lacks explicit security guarantees for Ukraine from the U.S. European leaders are trying to get Trump to commit to “backstopping” security guarantees provided by European nations.

French President Emanuel Macron, speaking during a press conference with Trump from the White House on Tuesday, said the president has “the capacity” to back up European security guarantees.

“A lot of my European colleagues are ready to be engaged, but we need this American backup because this is part of the credibility of the security guarantees,” Macron said. “This is part of our collective deterrence capacity and I have the feeling that the president has this capacity.”

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is also expected to raise with Trump how the U.S. can “backstop” European security investments in Ukraine. Starmer has proposed putting British soldiers on the ground in Ukraine as part of a deterrence effort against any renewed Russian aggression.

“The prime minister will want to talk to the president about what we see as the United States backstop of that deterrence,” a British official said in a briefing with reporters on Tuesday.

“We get it, that this needs to be a European endeavor. The prime minister has already said that we will put U.K. boots on the ground. But we know that European defense and the defense of Ukraine will depend in some parts on the U.S. and the U.S. willing to backstop the deterrence that we put in place.”

—Updated at 5 p.m. EST

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