Ivan Us, Jim Mullinax, Grzegorz Stec, and Xu Qinduo on the Ukraine-US Minerals Deal, Critical Minerals, and Rebuilding Ukraine

Speakers: Kaiser Kuo (moderator), Ivan Us (Kyiv), Jim Mullinax (Washington), Xu Qinduo (Beijing), Grzegorz Stec (Brussels)

A four-vantage panel — Kyiv, Washington, Beijing, Brussels — on the US–Ukraine Mineral Security Partnership signed on 1 May 2025, three weeks after the Oval Office clash that nearly killed it. Organised by Vita Golod’s Ukrainian Platform for Contemporary China and moderated by Kaiser Kuo, the discussion treats critical minerals less as an industrial-policy footnote than as a strategic fault line: an economic lifeline for Ukraine, a signalling device for Washington, a source of leverage for Beijing, and a dependency Europe is scrambling to escape.

Key ideas

1. The deal was Ukraine’s device for making the US a ‘shareholder of victory’. By Ivan Us‘s account, rare earths were a non-topic in Ukraine until October 2024, when a Trump win looked likely and Kyiv needed something to hold a transactional president’s interest. Zelensky’s ‘victory plan’ folded in an idea seeded by US Senator Lindsey Graham — offer joint exploration of Ukraine’s resources — alongside a Boris Johnson proposal to have Ukrainian troops backfill US bases in Europe. The logic: give Washington a stake in Ukraine winning, so that its own interests argue for continued support.

2. From Washington the deal is ‘skin in the game’, not a payout. Jim Mullinax stresses the reserves are unproven — the surveys date from the Soviet era, 30 to 40 years old — so any real value is years away and behind heavy capital expenditure. The agreement gives US firms a right of first refusal, tax-free status and a US pledge of no tariffs on Ukrainian mineral imports, and covers hydrocarbons as well as critical minerals. Its true payload is a message to Russia (and to European partners) that the US is committed to Ukraine.

3. China is the unspoken target — and holds the counter-leverage. The preamble’s language about barring ‘those who acted to support aggression’ from reconstruction points, Mullinax concedes, at China first and Russia second. Xu Qinduo reframes the picture: Beijing sides with Russia against the US, not against Ukraine — huddling together under US pressure — and wields its rare-earth export licensing as dual-purpose leverage, having banned heavy rare earths used almost exclusively by American defence contractors in response to the ‘liberation day’ tariffs, while keeping light rare earths flowing.

4. Europe’s vantage is dependence and belated strategic autonomy. Grzegorz Stec notes 98% of the EU’s rare-earth imports come from China; the 2023 Critical Raw Materials Act is Brussels’ attempt to diversify. The deal reads as a ‘mixed bag’: welcome US engagement, but a fear that American priorities crowd out European reconstruction interests amid an already-fraying transatlantic relationship. Europe, he says, is the institutionalist and regulator in the room, now learning to operate in a transactional world — with Greenland a parallel critical-minerals flashpoint between Washington and Brussels.

5. Reconstruction realpolitik: who can actually rebuild Ukraine? The deal’s implicit exclusion of China collides with the fact that China may be the only actor with the scale, technology and cost base to rebuild at speed — Xu’s claim, and one Stec partly concedes on cost while flagging security limits on Chinese involvement in critical infrastructure. A second twist: many deposits sit in Russian-occupied Donbas and Crimea, giving Washington a material stake in restoring Ukrainian control.

Context

The panel is organised around Kaiser Kuo’s three questions: how critical minerals came to sit at the centre of security and diplomacy; how the EU, US and Chinese approaches to mineral supply chains differ; and whether mineral diplomacy can support principled cooperation or only sharpen rivalry. The answers cluster by vantage.

Kyiv (Ivan Us). Us gives the fullest timeline. The deal nearly collapsed twice — first over US demands that past aid be reclassified as debt and that Washington hold a veto over Ukraine’s EU integration (unacceptable to Kyiv), then in the 28 February 2025 Oval Office scandal. Ukraine responded by bringing in foreign lawyers to write a version robust enough to survive court challenge, and was helped by wider events: as Washington’s tariff war strained the WTO, other states floated banning rare-earth exports to the US, making a friendly supplier like Ukraine more valuable to Washington than to Kyiv. Signing was followed within days by unblocked US weapons sales, F-16 spare parts, and green lights for Israeli and German air-defence transfers. Us frames the resource offer through a financial joke: a grant is money given by people who want to forget you, a credit is money given by people who believe you will win — Ukraine offered the US a reason to believe in its victory.

Washington (Jim Mullinax). Speaking in a personal capacity (a State Department officer on detail to the Wilson Center), Mullinax is careful to deflate expectations: unproven reserves, decades-old surveys, value years away. He locates the deal in a bipartisan through-line running from 2010 across the Obama, first Trump, Biden and second Trump administrations — diversify critical-mineral supply away from over-reliance on any one source, China above all. On the charge of extraterritoriality he resists it: the right of first refusal, he argues, only lets US firms match the best terms any other bidder could get, not beat them. Pressed on whether the deal amounts to a security guarantee, he declines to commit the administration but offers a personal hope that ‘skin in the game’ keeps the US invested in Ukrainian sovereignty.

Beijing (Xu Qinduo). Xu, a CGTN journalist and Pangoal Institution senior fellow, disputes the ‘China arms Russia’ narrative — pointing to Chinese-made DJI drones reaching Ukraine via third countries as evidence Beijing controls no such flows — and casts China as protecting its interests against a multi-front US offensive. On rare earths he counsels precision: the 2010 restriction on exports to Japan is his cautionary tale, a mismanaged move that spurred buyers to build alternatives; better to target narrowly (US arms makers over Taiwan) than to alienate Europe or the Global South. He also explains why Beijing has not weaponised the Ukraine deal as anti-colonial propaganda: China avoids a war of words, and unlike the unequal treaties of its own ‘century of humiliation’, Ukraine actually needs the US — so Beijing rests on the principle of respecting Ukraine’s sovereign choice.

Brussels (Grzegorz Stec). Stec, head of MERICS’ Brussels office, supplies the dependency map: 98% of EU rare-earth imports from China, 69% of rare-earth mining in China, 73% of cobalt from Congo, half of global nickel from Indonesia. He cites the 2020–21 halt of graphite exports to Sweden (amid the Huawei ban and Northvolt’s battery competition) as proof the dependency can be leveraged. Europe’s answer — the Critical Raw Materials Act, Global Gateway deals with Australia, Serbia and others — carries strong sustainability requirements that make it slower and less well-funded than US statecraft. His closing frame: the world is shifting from a globalist, values-based, institutional order to a security-minded, transactional one, and the EU must build ‘open strategic autonomy’ while keeping tough conversations with both Washington and Beijing alive.

See also

• Kaiser Kuo — moderator; Sinica host
• Ivan Us · Jim Mullinax · Xu Qinduo · Grzegorz Stec
• Kaiser Kuo, Eric Olander, Andrew Polk, and Lizzy Lee on the Geneva Trade Truce, the J-10C Dogfight, and China in Latin America — sibling Sinica panel on US–China trade and supply chains
• Scott Nolan on Uranium Enrichment, Founders Fund, and Reindustrialising America — resource security and Russian supply dependence from the US industrial vantage
• Shyam Sankar on Palantir, Reindustrialising America, and AI in Warfare — the reindustrialisation cluster this episode extends