Ukraine Has Lost The War – Zelensky Forced To Surrender Minerals Deal To Trump, But EU Hasn’t Figure That Out

Ukraine Has Lost The War – Zelensky Forced To Surrender Minerals Deal To Trump, But EU Hasn’t Figure That Out


February 27th, 2025 by financetwitter


After days of putting up a brave face, and trying to call Trump’s bluff, it appears Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has decided to fold in his silly poker game and surrenders the country’s key minerals deal demanded by U.S. President Donald Trump. The comedian had no idea that the POTUS could easily eat him for lunch and still grab Ukraine’s mineral deposits.

Mr Trump proudly told reporters on Tuesday (Feb 25) – “It’s a very big deal. It could be a trillion-dollar deal. We’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars on Ukraine and Russia fighting a war that should have never ever happened.” After days of rejecting the mineral-rights deal, Zelensky – with tail between legs – is expected to sign the deal as soon as Friday at a White House meeting with Trump.

Still, some Western news media who had previously bet – and lost – a propaganda war that Ukraine would win the war are now trying to twist and spin a new narrative – despite forced to surrender rare earth minerals, it’s a personal victory for Zelensky. In reality, Ukraine already lost the war the day Donald Trump won the presidential election in early November 2024.


The first sign Ukraine had lost is that while the war has stalled, the Russian army controls 20% of Ukraine’s territory. In 2024 alone, the Kremlin added 4,168 square kilometres (1,609 square miles) of Ukrainian land – almost twice the size of London – to its trophy. Three years since Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Zelensky’s army is still not able to re-capture those lands.

Second sign – the U.S.-led economic and financial sanctions against Russia have failed spectacularly. Back in March 27, 2022, Biden mocked the Russian currency, laughing at how the ruble was reduced to rubble. But the Russian currency had not only rebounded, but emerged as the strongest currency in the world that year. It did not collapse as fantasized by Washington and its European allies.

In fact, between 2022 and 2024, Russia’s trade surplus reached over US$600 billion. The GDP growth in Russia increased to 4.10% in 2024 from 3.60% in 2023. In comparison, the European Union’s economy grew only 0.4% in 2023, a decrease from the 3.4% growth seen in 2022. The E.U. GDP growth was only 0.9% in 2024. Germany, the economic powerhouse, has been in recession since 2023 till today.


Third, a whopping 10.6 million Ukrainians have been displaced – 5 times more than the Palestinians in the Israel-Hamas War which saw Gaza reduced to rubble and dust. If Zelensky was winning as claimed, Ukrainians would not be seeking shelter elsewhere. It was so bad that Ukraine had to lower the conscription age – targeting 18-year-olds with a military recruitment campaign to address a manpower crisis on the front lines.

Fourth, Russia (not Ukraine) is winning because despite the E.U. prohibiting the import of energy products from Russia, Europe silently imports Russian LNG (liquefied natural gas). In 2024 alone, E.U. imports of Russian LNG hit a record US$7 billion. Spain has imported more than US$8.9 billion of Russian LNG since the beginning of the war, and the European Union nearly US$21 billion.

And the biggest sign Ukraine is game over is Trump’s policy of embracing Russian President Vladimir Putin, a 180-degree reverse from Biden’s policy of ganging up with European Union and Zelensky to provoke Moscow with NATO membership for Ukraine. Immediately after taking the Oval Office, Trump rang Russia’s Vladimir Putin to send a 90-minute political friendship from the White House to the Kremlin.


But it was the beginning of a nightmare for both Zelensky and Europe. As a businessman who prefers making deals than starting wars, Trump wanted Ukraine’s minerals, a demand which Zelensky initially refused, leading to a war of words where the U.S. president called him a dictator who started the Ukraine war and all sorts of nasty things. The Commander-in-Chief even started negotiations with Putin without offering a seat at the table for both Zelensky and European allies.

Moscow did not have to do any heavy lifting. Trump administration declares that Ukraine will not join NATO. Worse, Putin can keep all the 20% Ukraine land or provinces Russia had seized. As the U.S. president scrambles to end the Ukraine War within 100 days, Putin will most likely get his other demand – the international community must recognize Russia’s annexations and lift their sanctions against it.

It’s still unclear if Trump will order NATO to withdraw its forces from its own eastern member states, a concession considered as a bonus if Putin gets his wish. But the best part is, even if Zelensky signs the minerals deal due to Trump’s pressure, there is no guarantee that it will include security guarantees for Ukraine. Zelensky hopes to reset his country’s friendship with Trump, who in turns wants to reset the U.S. friendship with Putin.


After spending a jaw-dropping US$280 billion in military, financial and humanitarian assistance without any sign of a victory against Russia, Trump has his reason to throw Ukraine under the bus. He is more keen on a deal for Ukraine’s mineral resources because the president wants to reduce dependency on China, which controls 75% of rare earth deposits in the world.

In December 2024, China banned the export of some rare earth minerals to the U.S., having previously limited mineral exports to the US the previous year. Critical minerals “are the foundation of the 21st Century economy” as they are key to renewable energy, military applications, industrial infrastructure and play “a growing strategic role in geopolitics and geoeconomics”.

More importantly, Ukraine has about 20,000 mineral deposits covering 116 types, but only about 15% of sites were being actively exploited at the time of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. It has 7% of Europe’s supplies of titanium, 30% of all European lithium deposits, one of five leading countries for supply of graphite, not to mention significant deposits of rare earth metals used to produce weapons.


Other elements found in Ukraine include beryllium and uranium, which are both crucial for nuclear weapons and reactors. Deposits of copper, lead, zinc, silver, nickel, cobalt and manganese are also found in the country which has about 5% of the world’s “critical raw materials”. But resources worth US$350 billion (up to 40%) have been seized by Russia in occupied territories – one of the reasons Putin invaded Ukraine.

Interestingly, Putin said he is open to offering the U.S. access to rare minerals, including from Russian-occupied Ukraine. Knowing how to bribe Trump, Putin cleverly suggested that Russia and the U.S. could collaborate on aluminium production in Krasnoyarsk, in Siberia, where one Russian aluminium maker, Rusal, has its largest smelters. Clearly, it was just a red herring to isolate Ukraine.

Most of the minerals under Ukrainian control have never been mined. To make them commercially viable will require years of studies and hundreds of millions of dollars of investment – capital that will be difficult to raise while the war is still going on. So, Trump would be out of office before he can even start talking about profits from Russian rare minerals.


But Putin’s offer to Trump was enough to create havoc in Europe. European Union leaders, who had wrongly bet that Donald Trump would not win the elections, or even if he did, he would not fulfil his promises, are now running around like a headless chicken. It was already bad that the so-called EU geopolitical “experts” said that the war would be quick and Ukraine would surely win the war.

It becomes worse that not only the sanctions failed to defeat Russia, and the Russian people did not topple Putin through uprising or rebellion as trumpeted by Western media, and the EU continues to purchase billions of dollars’ worth of Russian liquefied natural gas, but the same superpower has now switched sides and – hilariously – is siding with “dictator Putin”.

Without the U.S. support, NATO as well as Ukraine is dead. But the EU still hasn’t figured out that yet. So, the European Union leaders seem to be unable to do anything useful except having meaningless meetings and complaining about not given a seat at the table to negotiate about Ukraine. Europe is now in panic because they have been depended on the U.S. to do everything.


Make no mistake – Trump wants to become Putin’s best friend again, partly because the U.S. president wanted Russia and China to be divided. Such childish strategy, however, was crushed when Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin pledge “long-term ties” amid warming US-Russia relations. They understood U.S. president, hence policy, changes every four years.