Europe’s exclusion from the US-Russia talks today means “Ukraine has to go into those secondary talks playing by somebody else’s rules, playing mostly by Russia’s rules, which means the outcome is pretty foreordained before they even get to the table,” said analyst Matthew Schmidt.
Schmidt, an associate professor of national security at the University of New Haven, told CNN the talks raise the question of which potential peacekeepers could be accepted by both NATO and Russia.
Michael Bociurkiw, a former spokesperson for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, told CNN that Ukraine has “very little leverage” right now and relies on the US for “critical intel” used on the battlefield.
President Donald Trump’s administration is reportedly asking for “extortionate” amounts of rare earth minerals located in Ukraine, he said, potentially worth billions of dollars.
Some context: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Monday that he was open to signing a deal that would grant the US access to those rare earth minerals if Washington provides security guarantees to Kyiv in return.
Speaking to Fox News last week, Trump pointed to Ukraine’s “tremendously valuable land in terms of rare earth, in terms of oil and gas, in terms of other things. I want to have our money secured.”