The United States and Ukraine reportedly came close in recent days to signing a landmark minerals agreement that the Kyiv Independent reports would have obligated Ukraine to pay 50 percent of the proceeds from the “future monetization of all relevant Ukrainian Government-owned natural resource assets” (including minerals, oil, and gas) to a fund that the two countries would co-own, using the proceeds to ostensibly reinvest in Ukraine. The draft statement said that in return, the United States would maintain a “long-term financial commitment to the development of a stable and economically prosperous Ukraine.”

However, after a disastrous meeting at the White House on Friday, Feb. 28, between U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the deal appears to be off—at least for now. Even before Friday’s meeting, the State Department had canceled a U.S. Agency for International Development initiative intended to support the restoration of Ukraine’s grid.

It’s worth taking a closer look at the flurry of negotiations that led us here—including what can only be seen as a misunderstanding of the term “rare earths.”

Although the Ukrainians balked at an earlier version of the agreement, which they said did not specify a U.S. military commitment, Trump took to his social media platform Truth Social on Feb. 24 to tout “the importance of the vital Critical Minerals and Rare-Earths Deal between the United States and Ukraine, which we hope will be signed very soon!”

Over the last week in February, the Trump administration pressured the Ukrainian government to conclude the agreement. But Washington walked back one major demand: for Ukraine to contribute $500 billion to a U.S.-controlled fund—a sum more than twice Ukraine’s entire yearly economic output even before the Russian invasion, and far in excess of the estimated $120 billion that Ukraine has received in U.S. aid since January 2022.

The Trump administration has turned to other coercive measures against its onetime partner. Unless Ukraine signs the agreement, Washington has threatened to revoke access to Starlink, the Elon Musk-owned satellite system that provides the Ukrainians with key communications capabilities to organize their military response to Russia.

This transactional approach to security is echoed in Trump’s previous preoccupation with buying Greenland to access its critical minerals and natural resources. Minerals also play a role in the Trump administration’s talking points about the president’s desire to annex Canada. And these sentiments echo past hyperbole from other Americans about the value of potential mineral acquisitions in Afghanistan. But decades of political violence there has made it virtually impossible for any party to extract those resources, even after the major Soviet geological surveys that took place between the 1960s and 1970s detailed a wide range of mineral resources.

The unique realities of global minerals markets—as well as logistical conditions on the ground in Ukraine—make it highly unlikely that these assets would have any meaningful impact on U.S. national and economic security in the short and medium term.

The new approach, trading Ukraine’s potential resource wealth in return for vague assurances of U.S. support, has been characterized by some—including a former Ukrainian official who spoke with The Associated Press—as “a colonial agreement.”

Yet even from a purely interest-based perspective, however, there are several structural realities that prevent Ukraine’s extractive materials from contributing much to the U.S. national security community’s renewed interest in critical minerals.

First, the extent of Ukraine’s resources and known reserves is patchy given limited data. The last known assessment of the country’s mineral resources was done during Soviet geological surveys conducted between 1960 and 1980 using outdated exploration methods.

Both Zelensky and Trump have publicly lauded what Trump described as Ukraine’s “very valuable rare earths.” Rare earths are a group of 15-17 trace minerals that are used in applications such as magnets, which have both military and civilian applications in batteries as well as missile guidance systems.

But according to an S&P Global interview with geologist Tony Mariano, Ukraine holds no publicly known and economically viable rare-earth deposits, though it may possess some deposits of scandium, as information about this element is classified by the Ukrainian government.

It is possible that the media and Trump himself may have conflated rare-earth metals with the broader group of critical minerals. Ukraine does have some commercially viable deposits of titanium and gallium, which are both strategically important minerals with civilian and military applications. Some researchers have argued that Ukraine’s confirmed titanium ore deposits have a complex nature and may contain rare earths, but much more comprehensive surveying would be needed to confirm their presence and commercial viability. There has been past mining of graphite and manganese in the country.

The U.S. Geological Survey also ranks Ukraine fifth among European countries in terms of measured lithium deposits. Lithium is an important material for battery production. But many other countries also have significant deposits of the mineral—the problem is that mining them is not always commercially or politically viable. For example, Serbia’s Jadar lithium mine has been in development since the deposit was discovered in 2004, but in 2022, it had its license revoked by the Serbian government following mass environmental protests.

Even if a new geological survey were to confirm significant rare-earth and critical mineral resources in Ukraine, the commercial viability of extracting these resources may be low. First, developing new mines, whether they’re open pit or deep tunnel mines, is a slow process. Even if ground were broken tomorrow on new sites in Ukraine, they might not yield mineral resources for a decade or possibly two.

Extraction of minerals is even more difficult when there are ongoing military hostilities, and a number of the known mineral sites are located in eastern parts of the country that are currently occupied by the Russians, making their accessibility unlikely barring the recapture of that territory.

Russia’s ongoing campaign against Ukrainian critical infrastructure—and especially its sustained targeting of energy infrastructure—would further delay any prospect of commercial mining. Because mining is an extremely energy-intensive industry, any projects would first require a significant reconstruction of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure—necessitating, in turn, an end to Russia’s attacks. The war has also deeply degraded the workforce in the country.

Additionally, whether they’re mined in Ukraine, Greenland, or anywhere else in the world, minerals also need to be processed in order to be useful. In fact, our research shows that the primary security choke point around critical minerals is not the mining, but rather the processing and refining, which is largely controlled by China.

Even if the United States could access minerals through ally-shoring or the types of arrangements that are being proposed in Ukraine, China holds a majority the world’s refining and production capacity. For example, U.S. government researchers found that although China mined less than 20 percent of the world’s total supply of lithium in 2019, it controlled more than 60 percent of its production capacity.

The Biden administration made modest loans and investments in minerals exploitation and processing. In an executive order, President Trump has proclaimed the intention to become the leading producer and processor of minerals. The Trump administration has temporarily frozen some of those commitments; presumably, some of those projects are consistent with its wider goals of expanding the domestic minerals sector.

Both the Trump and Biden administrations recognized that the United States is now in global competition with China for access to minerals across the value chain. For decades, Beijing has conducted economic statecraft through measures such as its Belt and Road Initiative, which trades large-scale investment for access to resources, infrastructure, and other assets. In many ways, this project was developed based on earlier U.S. efforts to secure hydrocarbons from developing states—and, of course, the colonial projects of European nation-states during the 19th century.

Today, China has earned a reputation for striking predatory deals with states such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo for its minerals, including cobalt. In the first Trump presidency, his administration stood up a minerals diplomacy effort called the Energy Resource and Governance Initiative. Building on that initiative, the Biden administration established the Minerals Security Partnership (MSP). The MSP sought to persuade mineral-rich countries that Washington and other Western countries should be their preferred partners for accessing their resources because Western companies have higher standards and better practices—and because Western companies want to treat other countries as more equitable partners.

But as states have become savvier and more inclined to assert their sovereignty, they are less likely to accept unfavorable bargains. If Washington were to conclude a deal with Ukraine that is widely perceived as exploitative, then it may undercut the claim that the United States is a more benign and better partner than China. Just recently, the DRC, facing an on-going internal conflict abetted by its neighbor Rwanda, apparently asked the Trump administration for security support in trade for some minerals.

The Ukraine minerals agreement should it live again thus risks fostering unrealistic expectations for what Ukraine has as well as how much and how soon those mineral resources can be tapped. At the same time, barring major investments in processing, a new source of raw minerals would do little to address key U.S. vulnerabilities.

Finally, an inequitable deal with Ukraine could not only damage U.S. legitimacy in Ukraine, but also make it harder to conclude agreements elsewhere with countries that have active mining sectors.

Mark Deinert, an associate professor at the Colorado School of Mines, also contributed to this piece.