The agreement could provide a windfall to the U.S., but the resources will be expensive to extract, and any progress is unlikely while the war rages.
Now that the United States has secured a deal to share the rights to Ukraine’s mineral reserves — including elements crucial for a range of high-tech applications, from powering electric vehicles to producing warplanes and tanks — the path to actually extracting the minerals is fraught with formidable challenges and uncertainty.
And ending the war with Russia that has been raging for more than three years is only the first hurdle that will need to be overcome before the United States can realize any potential windfall.
Maps showing trillions of dollars of mineral deposits scattered across Ukraine — including in areas occupied by Russian forces — are based largely on outdated studies, and proper surveys could take several years to complete, experts said. The deposits might not be easy to extract; investors will need to pump billions into Ukraine to pull the resources from the earth.
And the nation’s energy infrastructure — which continues to be bombarded by Russian missiles and drones — will have to be repaired and upgraded to provide the enormous amounts of power needed to sustain mining operations.
President Trump has said the United States stands to reap hundreds of billions of dollars from the deal, far higher than the $1 billion annually that Ukraine earns in royalties from its natural resources.
Still, for the United States, the potential upside is enormous as Washington tries to find a way to limit its vulnerability to China’s dominance in the extraction and processing of minerals. China controls more than 90 percent of the global processing and 60 percent of the mining of the rare earth minerals that are used in products like cellphones and electric vehicles.