Zelensky wants to sell Ukraine's multi-trillion-dollar natural wealth to Trump

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wants to develop Ukraine's deposits of natural resource in cooperation with the United States. Yet, some of those deposits are located on the territories that Russia has taken under control, Polish publication Portal Obronny wrote.

Photo: commons.wikimedia.org by The White House, PDM

Volodymyr Zelensky and Donald Trump

Ukraine's multi-trillion-dollar mineral resources, such as titanium, graphite and lithium, could become a trump card in Zelensky's negotiations with the newly elected President of the United States Donald Trump. The article says that the Ukrainian president is well aware of Trump's practical foreign policy approach. Zelensky wants to take advantage to convince Trump that USA's assistance in Ukraine's defense meets USA's economic interests as Ukraine is incredibly rich in natural resources.

According to Canadian consulting firm SecDev, the following amounts of reserves were located on the territory of Ukraine in 2022:

• 7 percent of the world's titanium reserves,
• 20 percent of graphite reserves,
• and 500,000 tons of lithium.

Ukraine could not develop those deposits due to the lack of the technological capacity for that, but the West has all the required technology available.

At the same time, the implementation of Zelensky's plan is complicated by the location of the above-mentioned resources. The part of Ukraine that was richest in those resources is now part of Russia or remains under Russia's control:

• Donbass and Crimea have large deposits of natural (shale) gas — from 1.2 to 1.5 trillion cubic meters;
• Shale oil reserves on the Black Sea shelf are roughly estimated at 100-150 million barrels.

"Does anyone know how to force them [Russia] to give up almost 20 percent of the territory, which, according to their law, is already part of the Russian Federation?" the authors of the article in the Polish publication say.

Trump was particularly interested in several points of Zelensky's 'victory plan'

According to The Financial Times, Ukraine's allies in Europe and the United States advised drawing up a "victory plan" so that cooperation between Ukraine and the United States would continue even if Trump came to power. In order to interest the politician, two proposals were included in the document.

It is assumed that after the end of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, Ukrainian soldiers will replace some of the American forces in Europe. The second idea is to divide Ukrainian natural resources with Western partners. Donald Trump, as noted, evinced interest in both points.

Details

Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy (born 25 January 1978) is a Ukrainian politician and former entertainer who is serving as the sixth and current president of Ukraine since 2019, most notably during the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, ongoing since 2022. Born to a Ukrainian Jewish family, Zelenskyy grew up as a native Russian speaker in Kryvyi Rih, a major city of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast in central Ukraine. He obtained a degree in law from the Kryvyi Rih Institute of Economics, but never practised law and pursued a career in comedy and entertainment. He created the production company Kvartal 95, which produced films, cartoons, and TV shows including the TV series Servant of the People, in which Zelenskyy played a fictional Ukrainian president. The series aired from 2015 to 2019 and was immensely popular. A political party with the same name as the TV show was created in March 2018 by employees of Kvartal 95.