Summary
Ukraine is hesitating to sign a U.S.-backed deal that would grant American companies access to 50% of its rare earth minerals in exchange for continued military support.
President Zelenskyy cited legal concerns and the lack of security guarantees.
The deal, pushed by Trump allies, aims to showcase Ukraine’s value to U.S. interests while reducing reliance on Chinese minerals.
However, Kyiv’s 2021 strategic partnership with the EU complicates negotiations, as European leaders resist surrendering shared resources to Washington. Talks remain ongoing.
Poor Ukraine. One side wants to kill them all and steal the land, another side wants to rape its land, not to mention bordering Belarus, Slovakia and Hungary who are the bitches of Putin. We live in a sad reality
One side wants to kill them all
Not that I like fascist Putin, but isn’t the civilian casualty rate in Ukraine extremely low to other conflicts we’ve seen recently like the genocide in Gaza or the invasion of Iraq?
They deliberately target schools and hospitals, so take that as you will
They is unqualified, I assume you mean all of the three: US, Israel and Russia. For those who forgot or weren’t paying attention to US war crimes:
Saturday, 6 November, 2004, US strikes raze Falluja hospital
Edit: guessing from the downvotes war crimes committed by the US and Israel, or committed against Arabs and Afghans don’t count. War crimes are only bad if Russia does it. Good to know.
I think you’re going downvoted because you start off being disingenuous (“they” clearly refers to Russian invaders) and follow that up with some whataboutism.
I can assure you that the Lemmy population is quite aware of bad things being done, it having been done, by other governments. Even ones that live under those governments.
This is arguing syntax vs semantics.
Not sure what you mean. If my post reads like “understanding the written word helps” then yeah it does but that isn’t remotely what my point was.
Well, you’ve found yourself in a thread about the Ukraine-Russia conflict, so those others are irrelevant to this discussion
Fuck Hamas
Edit: hope you weren’t one of those fools that voted for Trump. He wants to turn Gaza into a strip mall or a golf course
Perhaps the Afgani’s and Palestinians shouldn’t start fights they can’t finish.
I’m not taking anything in any way, I’m making a statement about numbers, not about intentions
Only because Russia is failing to do what they’ve really wanted to do since the beginning, or did you forget Bucha.
They’re still stealing children by the thousands though.
Russia is so incompetent that it fails at killing more civilians than trained personnel? Is that the argument?
For now
Yes, if Russia turns to murdering civilians on the scale of Iraq or Gaza, I’ll be the first to condemn that more, but it isn’t the case as of now. Not that this justifies the invasion or the nationalist Russian ideology, ofc
That is the end goal. Gulag for the political dissedents, chattle slavery for the rest of the Ukranians. Best to stop russias colonial ambitions before it gets to that point.
Not really what I think the end goal is. The invasion of Ukraine is a military response to the lack of soft power of Russia to maintaining a sphere of influence otherwise, through diplomatic and economic and other means. Guess only time will tell
If it weren’t for things like this.https://www.nbcnews.com/specials/ukraine-missing-children-taken-by-russia-kherson/index.html
The source of this information isn’t investigative journalism, it’s claims from the Ukrainian government (as stated inside the article), which is famously known to be at war with the country it’s accusing of war crimes. Russian government sources claim that Ukrainians were performing ethnic cleansing of Russian Ukrainians before the invasion and they’re saving them from genocide, should we take that at face value too?
Of course it’s always difficult counting the dead, and Russia doesn’t allow any monitoring of this kind of thing in the territory it controls. But it’s likely the number of civilian deaths is around double that of Gaza. The numbers for the military is likely more than double that.
Ukraine does it’s best to protect it’s civilian population and their soldiers wear uniforms. Hamas does not wear uniforms, and actively prevents civilians from evacuating from areas where there’s combat operations. In fact having combat operations happening in populated areas was basically the point of massacring villages while taking hostages, both of which are war crimes. If you want to negotiate a prisoner release you don’t massacre villages, if you want a war that minimizes civilian casualties, you don’t take hostages to densely populated areas.
Hamas created a scenario to maximize civilian deaths, and it will probably never be known the true number of civilian deaths since they didn’t wear uniforms so the number of Hamas dead and number of civilian deaths can’t be distinguished. Israel claims half the number you see reported are Hamas, while Hamas claims it’s much less.
Note the difference between a military that protects it’s civilians and wears uniforms and what Hamas is doing. Larger numbers of soldiers than civilians die in Ukraine because they prioritize protecting civilians, while larger numbers of civilians than soldiers die in Gaza as fodder for their propaganda machine.
Note that Hamas is suddenly wearing uniforms as soon as a ceasefire is in effect. How often do you remember seeing them wear uniforms in combat when doing so would prevent civilian casualties? They have uniforms, they just don’t wear them in combat in order to maximize confusion which results in civilian casualties.
the number of civilian deaths
I specifically talked about ratios and not about absolute numbers. Ukraine has an order of magnitude more people than Palestine, it would be surprising if there weren’t more casualties overall.
Hamas does not wear uniforms, and actively prevents civilians from evacuating from areas where there’s combat operations
OK, Zionist and genocide apologist.
The audacity to frame resource extraction as “aid” would be impressive if it weren’t so transparent. Ukraine’s rare earth minerals aren’t collateral for loans—they’re the spoils of geopolitical brinkmanship, dressed in the rotting corpse of diplomacy.
Trump’s team operates like feudal overlords, demanding tribute from a nation under siege. Those minerals power everything from missiles to smartphones. Calling this a “reimbursement” is like mugging a drowning man and calling it debt collection.
Now they’re floating troop deployments to “guard” these assets? Please. This isn’t peacekeeping—it’s a protection racket, ensuring the extraction pipeline stays open while the propaganda machine spins conquest as charity.
I figured it was more like the tributary system in imperial China
That’s a fair analogy, but even the tributary system had a veneer of mutual benefit—imperial China at least pretended to offer cultural or economic exchange. This? It’s pure extraction with none of the pretense.
The modern empire doesn’t bother with subtlety; it just calls the theft “aid” and expects applause. At least the tributary states got to keep their sovereignty on paper. Here, sovereignty is collateral damage in the race for resources.
What we’re witnessing isn’t just imperialism; it’s a corporate feudalism where nations are reduced to resource farms for the highest bidder. The tributary system had rituals; this has press releases.
Good point, I would have said technofuedalism, but yours is probably more apt, and describes Curtis Yarvins vision more appropriately
China usually gave gifts back to those states which was much more valuable than the tribute itself. Koreans were famously abusing it by sending tribute multiple times a year. China had to put a limit on them because it became a problem.
Trump’s team operates like feudal overlords, demanding tribute from a nation under
That’s a very apt analogy. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but Trump’s demands so far remind me of his stupid nonsense about making Mexico pay for his wall back in 2016.
He honestly thinks everyone’s just going to lay down.
He operates under the assumption that audacity equals strategy, as if shouting demands into the void will make them manifest. The “Mexico will pay for it” fiasco was the prototype: a hollow threat wrapped in nationalist theater. It’s not about anyone laying down; it’s about how long they can keep up the charade before the cracks show.
The real tragedy is that these tactics aren’t even subtle. It’s all brute force masquerading as diplomacy, a sledgehammer where a scalpel is needed. People see through it, but the machine churns on, feeding on apathy and short memories. The question isn’t whether anyone lays down—it’s whether anyone stands up long enough to matter.
Fuck, everyone has been giving us communists shit for the past 8 decades for explaining this is the exact way that imperialist powers operate in their colonies. Maybe we all will finally understand now that the Ukraine war was never a conflict of Russian expansionism vs Ukrainian national defence, but an imperialist proxy war between US and Russia?
If you’re being reductive to the point where you’re ignoring the importance of sovereignty and democracy, then it’s fair game to reduce communism to being just about some college kids that think Che Guevara T-Shirts look cool.
So it’s reductive to talk about imperialist wars, but not about “Russia want territory, Ukraine rightful defense”? Wanna talk sovereignty and democracy? We could start way back with Euromaidan. Funny how spontaneous and disorganised protests outside US-influence end up with pro-US regime changes, whereas huge protests movements lasting years such as the Occupy movement in the US, the Gilets Jeunes in France or the 15-M in Spain end up in nothing. I guess we don’t question democracy and sovereignty in these instances now, do we? No complex analysis to be had there
Trumps idea here is much more than the usual Trump stupidity. First, Trump gets fat mineral rights for doing about nothing. The Ukraine loses 20% of its original (pre-2014) size, but gains no real security like a NATO membership. And the Europeans should work and pay for all this, while having no say in the whole thing.
This is no deal, this is rape.
You’re one hundred percent correct aside from:
theUkraine.
Handover the mineral wealth in Crimea and other occupied areas subject to them being under Ukrainian control but leave mineral wealth in free Ukraine out of the deal to provide some motivation for Dopey Donald.
Seriously. The biggest deposit is sitting in occupied land…
The biggest deposit is currently sitting in the White House.
Ukraine got used to weaken Putin and now the US sweeps in and recoups the cost for free. Ukrainians lose part of their country to Russia and hand over the minerals of the other half to America.
Imagine being Ukrainian and having died for this.
Being a US enemy is bad. Being a US ally is deadly
the ‘deal’ the diaper is working on between him and ukraine is a sham.
i think the real ‘deal’ is between him and putin: ‘give us (me) half of some of the goodies there and we’ll not stand in your way to take the whole thing’
I agree that the deal is a sham, but I think the goal was to present a deal so obviously unacceptable to Ukraine that they would be bound to refuse and Trump can then point to it and say Ukraine is uncooperative therefore he can refuse to support them any further.
-
Require enough support from the US to push out Russia completely out of ALL occupied territories, including Crimea.
-
Require full and permanent membership of NATO
-
Allow access to 25% and only from uninhabited areas that aren’t nature reserves. Leave it up to the US to pillage and destroy the country completely
-
What happens if he signs the deal, gets the aid, beats Russia back and reneges? Serious question.
“American warship, go fuck yourself.”
The US already abandoned their promise to protect Ukraine from a Russian invasion after they agreed to give up their nuclear arsenal, so I can’t imagine why they would trust us this time especially with a nutjob like Trump at the helm.
The US promised they would not invade Ukraine, but they never promised they would protect Ukraine.
The US promised to aid Ukraine should they ever be invaded after giving up their nuclear arms. Go read the Budapest Memorandum, specifically section 4.
Section 4:
The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and The United States of America reaffirm their commitment to seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance to Ukraine, as a non-nuclear-weapon state party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, if Ukraine should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used
The US promised to seek action from the UN Security Council if Ukraine suffered or was threatened with nuclear attack.
Ukraine hasn’t suffered a nuclear attack. Even so, the US did seek action from the Security Council, but it was predictably vetoed by Russia.
Commas. “object of act of aggression” and “object of threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used” are two different, independent, conditions.
And btw China seems to be enforcing the latter. They independently gave Ukraine nuclear guarantees, just shy of calling it a nuclear umbrella, and there has been a suspicious absence of nuclear threats against Ukraine while there’s no shortage of Russian threats against NATO.
There are no commas in the text. And even under your interpretation, the US is only obligated to seek action by the UN Security Council. They have done so.
American promises aren’t worth shit. Just ask the Native Americans, the Kurds, and probably a bunch more countries.
Like a reasonable person who sees a proposal with huge future impact - he is likely consulting lawyers (“is this permissible by law?”) and other politicians (“is this a good move currently or strategically?”).
Then comes time to present counter-proposals. One of them may be “we get considerably more help from Europe and they don’t ask for half of the country’s minerals - on this background, let’s revise assistance and security guarantees upwards”.
Trump’s current proposal is such a poorly chosen one that one could show it to Xi and ask “for this extreme price, would you reign in your vassal named Putin, and cut exports of anything with a microchip into Russia?”.
Hahahaha.
Dude, like half the reason of this war is about control over Ukraine’s resources.
It’s like his version of Putin’s special military operation.
Special wartime profiteering?
EU could just make him a better deal?
DONT SIGN SHUT from the Orange Retard
Just tell the US they can have any resources they can liberate from Russia. We’d have tanks at Moscow in hours.
Which, seeing the treatment Ukraine is getting by the US, I assume you believe it’s a bad thing right? Right?
The US only does things selfishly, so yeah. Though Russia really doesn’t have it better.
Agreed, but tanks in Moscow aren’t the solution
If you thought that was a sincere suggestion, I didn’t /s nearly hard enough.
Not so much about your lack of /s, there’s widespread russophobia since 2022 in the west and many people simply don’t care what happens to so+called “orcs”
I have worked with many Russians in the past, they are fantastic engineers. The people are wonderful. But it’s very obvious why there is Russophobia considering they are the ones actively trying to capture land from other sovereign nations.
I don’t hate Americans or English for the actions of their governments, I don’t see why I should hate Russians
At this point I wonder who is worse Trump or Putin.
Both are worse than the other.
Wasn’t the US supporting a genocide until like a month ago? Is this question really only popping right now in your head?
Well duh. Trump is incapable of meaning anything he says.
not worth the paper it was printed on
