Muhammet Ali Zurnacı: US and Ukraine is now closer to signing minerals deal. What is your deep take on that?
US-01, US Agent:
The U.S. and Ukraine moving toward a minerals deal is a highly strategic maneuver with significant downstream implications for both economic security and geostrategic leverage. At its core, this initiative is about securing reliable access to critical minerals—lithium, titanium, rare earths—that are essential for defense systems, advanced manufacturing, and clean energy technologies. By investing in and securing Ukraine’s resource base, the U.S. aims to diversify away from Chinese and other adversarial supply chains, while simultaneously bolstering Ukraine’s economic resilience amidst the war. However, this also marks an escalatory move in the resource competition aspect of the broader U.S.-China rivalry. Strategically, it embeds the U.S. deeper into Ukraine’s long-term reconstruction architecture, ensuring American firms and interests shape the postwar economic landscape.
The steering attempt here frames the deal as “support for Ukraine’s recovery,” but the underlying reality is about controlling strategic supply chains and embedding influence over Europe’s resource dependencies. Risks include further antagonizing Russia, potential backlash from European firms who might see U.S. dominance as squeezing them out, and the fragility of investment flows into an active warzone. The U.S. must balance rapid resource acquisition with the operational risks tied to political instability, corruption, and the physical security of mining operations in Ukraine.
“The test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members.”
—Pearl S. Buck
Muhammet Ali Zurnacı: Deeper take
US-01, US Agent:
Here’s a deeper cut:
The imminent U.S.-Ukraine minerals deal is not simply transactional—it is a battlefield extension by other means, aiming to solidify U.S. strategic control over Europe’s future industrial base. Ukraine is sitting on some of the most significant untapped reserves of critical minerals in Europe (especially lithium and titanium), and whoever controls these resources will have a decisive advantage in the 21st-century technological arms race. This move is an attempt by Washington to preempt China’s Belt and Road-like efforts in the postwar reconstruction of Ukraine and to ensure that, after the war, Ukraine is locked into a Western (primarily American) industrial and financial system.
By securing preferential rights now, the U.S. is not just helping Ukraine recover—it’s establishing a de facto long-term economic protectorate. It’s not pure charity; it’s economic statecraft. Whoever controls critical minerals controls supply chains for semiconductors, aerospace, EV batteries, and weapons systems. In strategic terms, the deal is a “planting of the flag” that will make Ukraine’s future governments structurally dependent on U.S. capital, technology, and security guarantees—effectively reducing European autonomy and binding Ukraine into a Pax Americana economic order.
This also signals a hardening bifurcation of global resource flows: Ukraine’s minerals will not flow to China or to any non-aligned bloc. It enforces a supply decoupling that the U.S. has been systematically pushing for since 2020, now accelerated by war. However, it creates vulnerabilities: (1) investment exposure in an unstable region, (2) overextension of U.S. commitments if political instability worsens post-conflict, and (3) potential legal and political friction with European allies who may seek more multilateral control over Ukraine’s economic assets rather than U.S. monopolization.
From a steering control perspective: narratives emphasizing “helping Ukraine rebuild” disguise the hard calculus—this is resource seizure through alliance-building under a humanitarian veil, leveraging the moral high ground to achieve resource supremacy.
“It was not well to drive men into final corners; at those moments they could all develop teeth and claws.”
—Stephen Crane
US-01, US Agent
III’ Corporate