Zelensky To Visit White House To Sign New Mineral Deal With U.S.

President Donald Trump told reporters on Monday afternoon that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will travel to the United States this week to sign a new mineral deal with the United States.

“I hear that [Zelensky is] coming on Friday,” Trump said. “Certainly it’s OK with me if he’d like to.”

Ukrainian officials confirmed to multiple publications that Zelensky will meet with President Donald Trump on Friday to sign the deal at the White House.

The Financial Times reported that Ukraine agreed to the terms of the mineral deal that was proposed by the Trump administration, which it hopes bolsters its relationship with the United States, but only after the United States dropped its demand for the right to $500 billion in potential revenues from the minerals to repay the United States for the assistance it has received over the last three years.

“It’s a very big deal. It could be a trillion dollar deal,” Trump told reporters Tuesday. “We’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars on Ukraine and Russia fighting a war that should have never, ever happened.”

The deal reportedly establishes a fund into which Ukraine “would contribute 50% of proceeds from the ‘future monetization’ of state-owned mineral resources, including oil and gas, and associated logistics,” the report said. “The fund would invest in projects in Ukraine.”

The deal does not include mineral resources that are already being developed by Ukraine’s largest gas and oil producers for Ukraine’s government coffers, the report said.

The deal does not list any specific United States security guarantees that Ukraine had demanded nor does it address “the size of the US stake in the fund and the terms of ‘joint ownership’ deals to be hashed out in follow-up agreements,” the report added.

The deal comes after Trump called Zelensky a “dictator” last week.

Olha Stefanishyna, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister who has been in charge of the negotiations, said that the minerals agreement was only “part of the picture.”

“We have heard multiple times from the US administration that it’s part of a bigger picture,” she added.