(Bloomberg) — Ukraine agreed with the US to jointly develop its wealth of natural resources as part of a deal that could ease tension with President Donald Trump and advance his administration’s goal of a ceasefire with Russia, people familiar with the matter said.
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Ukraine’s cabinet is expected to recommend on Wednesday that the agreement be signed, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private deliberations. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is planning to travel to the US Friday to seal the accord, 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.”
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Trump has pressured Zelenskiy to accept the agreement, first presented by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in Kyiv earlier this month. The Ukrainian president rejected previous versions, saying the US was demanding too much from the war-battered country.
The agreement is at the heart of a diplomatic push by the new Trump administration to fulfill the president’s pledge to bring the three-year war to an end quickly. NATO allies have been stunned by Trump’s overtures to Moscow and sudden lurch away from Kyiv, including the US president calling Zelenskiy a “dictator” as he adopted the Kremlin’s talking points that Ukraine hold a wartime election.
The minerals deal came together after the US dropped the demand for Ukraine 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. Those have been a key priority for Ukraine, whose leaders have been alarmed by Trump’s repeated broadsides against Zelenskiy 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.
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