Yuri Kobzar16:09, 25.03.25

The US president has repeatedly emphasized that he wants “rare earth elements,” and this has experts wondering.

The United States hopes to sign an agreement on Ukrainian minerals soon. However, experts still wonder why the Americans need this agreement at all, since there is no evidence that Ukraine actually has significant reserves of rare earth minerals. This is reported by Business Insider .

“I can’t find any credible evidence of rare earth deposits in Ukraine. At all,” Laura Lewis, a professor of chemical, mechanical and industrial engineering at Northeastern University’s College of Engineering (USA), told Business Insider.

Erik Jonsson, a senior geologist at the Geological Survey of Sweden, said that “Ukraine has a strong mining industry, but it is not based on rare earth metals.”

Trump has called the potential profits from the deal a means of reimbursing the cost of military aid to Ukraine, while emphasizing his desire to obtain Ukrainian “rare earths,” which can be translated as “rare earth elements/minerals/metals.”

As Business Insider notes, the deal covered a huge amount of fossil resources, including titanium and graphite, which are already successfully mined in Ukraine. But the real excitement in the White House was caused by rare earth elements – truly rare minerals from which some types of materials are obtained, which are critically needed in the modern electronics and defense industries.

In February, Trump said he wanted to get “$500 billion worth of rare earths” from the deal. Then his appetites grew even more.

“It could be a trillion-dollar deal, it could be anything, but it’s rare earths and other things,” he once said.

The problem, however, is that the evidence base for the presence of significant quantities of rare earth metals in Ukraine is extremely weak and needs further confirmation, experts say. Everything that is known about these deposits is based on geological exploration dating back to Soviet times. Both Jonsson and Lewis say that this data is not enough to interest potential investors.

This does not mean that Ukraine does not have rare earth deposits suitable for development, says Jonsson. But more data on them is needed.

Experts emphasize that rare earth elements require much more complex processing than more traditional fossil resources, such as coal or iron ore. To obtain a usable material, the mined minerals must be subjected to intensive chemical processing using the latest technologies.

“Just because you have something in the ground doesn’t mean you can get a metal form of it that goes into technology,” Lewis said.

To truly start mining Ukraine’s rare earth minerals, she said, would likely require a multibillion-dollar upfront investment and at least a decade and a half. With that in mind, investors want certainty about things like land rights and the quality of infrastructure — which have huge question marks in war-torn and partially occupied Ukraine, experts say.

(C)UNIAN 2025