The US won’t repeat the mistakes of the Iraq War by failing to secure valuable resources from Ukraine in exchange for help ending Russia’s nearly three-year-old invasion, President Trump’s special envoy to the conflict exclusively told The Post.
“When you look at the mineral deposits in that country, we’re not talking millions of dollars. We’re talking — virtually every region, we’re talking about billions, and then some regions are [worth] trillions,” retired Gen. Keith Kellogg said this week.
“You can come up with a deal, and that’s what [Trump] has the Treasury looking at: ‘OK, how do you make a deal where aid is predicated off of the payback [of] precious metals?’”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday signaled support for a reciprocal resource deal with the US in exchange for security guarantees as part of a potential peace settlement.
“If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelensky told Reuters.
Zelensky has previously said Ukraine wants either NATO membership or nuclear rearmament to prevent Moscow from re-invading after the guns fall silent.
Ukraine is home to roughly 5% of the world’s mineral resources, with rich deposits of titanium, uranium, iron, manganese and lithium — as well as rare earth minerals that are considered vital to US national security.
“When we walked out of the Iraq War, we don’t have a single oil contract in Iraq proper — they’re all in Kurdistan,” Kellogg explained. “Nothing. All the sacrifice went to no one. So I think the president is taking an economical look: ‘If you want to do this, there’s got to be something good for the American people,’ and that’s how he’s looking at it.”
On Friday, Trump told reporters he intended to meet with Zelensky next week and indicated he was interesting in discussing Ukraine’s resources and obtaining “an equal amount of something” in exchange for American backing.
“We would like them to equalize,” said the president, who added that he wants to see the “ridiculous” European war brought to an end “just on a human basis” and that many Ukrainian cities have been devastated “worse than Gaza.”
Ukraine holds about 7% of the world’s supply of titanium — the largest reserves of any European country — which is needed for the production of everything from aerospace and defense materials to medicine and jewelry. It is also used in other industries such as energy and construction.
The US does not maintain its own supply of titanium in the National Defense Stockpile, instead buying from other nations — including adversaries.
In 2022, the US bought nearly $80 million worth of titanium from China and more than $63 million from Russia, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity.
Ukraine also has one of the continent’s largest confirmed reserves of lithium — a vital component in batteries and used in everyday products from ceramics to medicine — at roughly 500,000 metric tons.
Crucially, while the Russian-occupied eastern Donbas region has about 20% of Ukraine’s mineral reserves — most of Kyiv’s most valuable assets are in the central, northern, and western regions of the country, out of Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin’s reach.
“We need to stop Putin and protect what we have — a very rich Dnipro region [in] central Ukraine,” Zelensky told Reuters.
While there are some rare earth reserves in Russian-held eastern Ukraine, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) critical minerals security program director Gracelin Baskaran said they may be less prevalent — and less of a reason behind Moscow’s invasion — than some reports have indicated.
“There’s resources [there], but it’s primarily coal, and you’re not going to go decimate something for coal,” Baskaran said.
Trump might also consider gaining concessions in Ukraine’s energy industry, Atlantic Council nonresident fellow Alex Plitsas told The Post on Friday.
“Ukraine has their energy and gas sector,” he said. “There’s a lot of deposits in terms of metals that are critical for manufacturing — a whole host of sectors the US would benefit from and [lessening] its dependence on Russia and China.”
Ukraine is also known as the “breadbasket of Europe” due to its strong grain exports, Plitsas added, but the war must end before those resources can be tapped for US gain.
“They have the most fertile soil in the entire world,” he said. “The farmland is obviously being inhibited by the unexploded ordinance and things of that nature, but Ukraine has a lot to offer in terms of things that it could, you know, exchange back to the US for whatever is necessary.”
The Trump administration’s first big test on the international stage will take place at next week’s Munich Security Conference, which Kellogg will attend as part of the US delegation led by Vice President JD Vance.
Kellogg also told The Post he plans to visit with NATO leaders during his travel to discuss bringing Europe’s biggest and deadliest conflict since World War II to a close.
