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Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good

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May 1, 2025

A US–Ukraine Minerals Deal, Finally

Two months ago, an Oval Office meltdown featuring US President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky saw the Ukrainian leader leave Washington without having inked an anticipated deal to grant Washington access to some of Ukraine’s minerals.
 
On Wednesday, after more last-minute snags, the US and Ukraine agreed to the deal.
 
It does not appear to sign away ownership of Ukraine’s minerals. The deal does create a joint investment fund and offer top-tier preferential access to the US for mining projects in Ukraine. Weapons will count as US contributions to the investment fund, and the deal does not require Kyiv to repay Washington for past military assistance, as Ukraine’s Economic Ministry notes.
 
“First proposed by the Ukrainians to President Joe Biden last autumn as a trade of mineral rights for more weapons, the deal soon became a test of unquestioning loyalty to Donald Trump,” The Economist writes. “Drafts were presented by his officials in angry ultimatums, before vanishing.” In a way, it sounds as if Washington and Kyiv ended up—after much strife—close to where they started. Noting cautious optimism in Ukraine about the deal, The Guardian’s Shaun Walker writes: “Ukrainian analysts have noted that Kyiv has apparently been able to extract some major concessions, despite Donald Trump’s repeated claim that Ukraine ‘has no cards’ to play. ‘Ukraine held the line. Despite enormous pressure, every overreaching demand from the other side was dropped. The final deal looks fair,’ Tymofiy Mylovanov, president of the Kyiv School of Economics, wrote on X.”
 
The bullish take on this deal, when Zelensky appeared poised to sign it in February, argued it would yoke Washington to Kyiv’s future and give Trump a stake in Ukraine’s survival. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reinforced that view by saying, on signing the deal, that it “signals clearly to Russian leadership that the Trump administration is committed to a peace process centered on a free, sovereign, and prosperous Ukraine over the long term.” Now that it has been signed, The New York Times’ Kim Barker writes that the deal “has tied Mr. Trump to Ukraine’s future.”
 
Critics have warned along the way that the deal is predatory. In an almost unanimously positive roundup of Atlantic Council expert reactions, lone dissenter Ed Verona argues the deal “is tantamount to picking the pockets of an assault victim.” Verona also doubts it will hold up, warning: “Russia, ironically, provides an example of how resource-related deals can come unraveled. Production sharing agreements signed during the difficult transitional period of the 1990s were subsequently repudiated by [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s regime, with Western partners forced to surrender control and majority ownership in major projects. There are many more such examples in the developing world. I suspect that few serious US investors will put their shareholders’ money at risk based on such a clearly unbalanced ‘deal.’”
 
As for the deal’s impact on peace negotiations and Ukraine’s future, The Economist writes: “Much will depend on how Mr Trump now uses the agreement in negotiations with Vladimir Putin. Many insiders believe his mind is yet to be made up on Ukraine, despite the strong isolationist and anti-Ukrainian leanings of the MAGA base and his political appointees. … The hope remains that the deal could, eventually, bring real security guarantees or weapons—and fulfil the aims of the original quid pro quo the Ukrainians offered America last autumn.”

That Peace Plan

The minerals deal could be particularly important as Trump’s broader peace initiative, featuring direct talks with Moscow, appears to have stalled.
 
After a brief meeting between Trump and Zelensky on the sidelines of Pope Francis’ funeral in Rome last weekend, Trump questioned whether Putin wants a deal. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio—who will now also serve as interim national security adviser, following a Cabinet shakeup announced Thursday in the wake of leaked Signal text messages about military plans—indicated in mid-April that the US would “move on” if a peace deal couldn’t be reached. As details of a reported Trump-administration peace plan came into focus soon after, Trump took to social media to lambaste Zelensky for not agreeing to it (“He can have Peace or, he can fight for another three years before losing the whole Country”) and Putin for continuing attacks on Ukraine (“Vladimir, STOP!”).
 
The potential peace agreement offered up by the Trump administration was panned by backers of Kyiv, who said it would give Ukraine little aside from a sliver of Russian-occupied Kherson Oblast and vague Western security guarantees. US official recognition of Crimea as Russian and de facto recognition of other seized territories as Russian—both reportedly included in the deal—“would fly in the face” of Trump’s first-administration policy against recognizing Kremlin territorial claims in Ukraine, David J. Kramer of the George W. Bush Institute wrote for Foreign Policy. At The Washington Post, columnist Max Boot warned: “If Trump tries to bludgeon Ukraine into accepting this one-sided plan, he will be rewarding aggression and making the world a more dangerous place.” Max Bergmann of the Center for Strategic and International Studies suggested last week that Kyiv was unlikely to agree to the terms, joining Boot and other critics in calling the proposed deal one-sided.
 
Others were less critical. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius quoted former top US diplomat in Ukraine William B. Taylor Jr. as saying the proposed agreement was “in the zone of the negotiable, and with some work, they could get it over the line.” Ignatius’ own conclusion: “The challenge for Trump has been how to couple this hunger for a ceasefire with security guarantees for Ukraine that are strong and credible enough to stop Putin from invading again. Trump isn’t there yet, but he’s getting closer.”
 
Unsatisfying as it seems, the proposed peace agreement may nonetheless be “the most efficacious way to save Ukrainian lives right now,” W. James Antle III writes for The American Conservative. “The basic framework of the peace deal Trump is attempting to secure is simply a recognition of reality. Ukraine cannot for the foreseeable future win back much of the territory it lost in the war—and especially before the current war—or join NATO. Russia cannot realistically take much more Ukrainian territory than it already has, but it can inflict much more death and destruction trying.”
 
In a Kyiv Independent op-ed, Chatham House’s Timothy Ash suspects gamesmanship on Kyiv’s part: “It seems Zelensky is playing for time. He likely understands that Trump will eventually walk away from the negotiations, taking Putin with him. In the meantime, Ukraine still has access to a significant portion of the $61 billion U.S. military aid package approved under former U.S. President Joe Biden's administration. Zelensky likely wants to draw down as much of that support as possible—and secure additional European financial and military assistance—before rejecting any Trump-brokered deal.”

Ukraine Without

the US?

Amid those stalled negotiations, experts continue to wonder what will happen to Ukraine if the US simply abandons it. That’s the topic of a Foreign Affairs essay by two close Ukraine watchers, Liana Fix of the Council on Foreign Relations and Catholic University historian Michael Kimmage. Their conclusion: Ukraine could survive, but Europe would face serious challenges.
 
“[A] Ukraine shunted aside by the United States would not be a Ukraine abandoned,” Fix and Kimmage write. “After three years of war, dozens of countries now support Ukraine’s increasingly capable military. … [I]t is not within the power of the United States to end the war by pulling out. Although Ukraine will struggle to hold the line without U.S. support, Russia has no easy path to victory. The real risk … is not that Ukraine will immediately collapse, but that individual European countries might lose the political will to stand up to Russia. … European leaders would conclude that Washington, having devoted itself to normalizing ties with Moscow, is no longer interested in providing the credible deterrence it had supplied for decades. They would perceive the Trump administration’s abandonment of Ukraine as the first step toward a post-American Europe, if not a post-American world. Against this backdrop, Moscow may be tempted to scare Europe into submission, and some Europeans might choose appeasement rather than risk Russia’s wrath.”
 
As European countries weigh the possibility of sending a peacekeeping force to Ukraine to help uphold any negotiated truce, Leo Litra writes for the European Council on Foreign Relations that Europe would prefer to have a “backstop” of US military power itself, in case Russian troops break an agreement and make gains against European forces.
 
“[A] US ‘backstop’ to deter Russian attacks on the European force seems to be a condition for some of Ukraine’s European allies to participate in the mission,” Litra writes. “The US has military capabilities such as in air defence, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) that remain underdeveloped in European forces. .... If the US backstop is absent entirely, the participating countries will need to tailor the current capacities of their armies to those of Ukraine’s and ‘make do’ as they work to see the benefits of their increased defence spending over the coming years.”

Pope Francis’ Legacy—and What Comes Next

On Sunday’s GPS, Fareed talked with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat about the impact of Pope Francis’ progressivism on the Catholic world and how his legacy may affect the election of the new pope.

In the Event of a Blockade

Early last month, China’s military drills around Taiwan underscored the danger that Beijing could launch an invasion, Stanford Hoover fellow Eyck Freymann and Cambridge researcher Hugo Bromley write in the current edition of the Hoover Digest, published by Stanford’s Hoover Institution policy think tank. As they note, then-CIA Director William Burns warned Congress in early 2023 that Chinese leader Xi Jinping had ordered China’s military to be ready for such an invasion by 2027.
 
“A full-scale invasion of Taiwan is one eventuality,” Freymann and Bromley write. “That isn’t Xi’s only option. He could use his far larger coast guard and military to impose a ‘quarantine,’ allowing merchant shippers and commercial airlines to travel in and out of Taiwan only on China’s terms. This strategy would mirror Beijing’s moves in the South China Sea, where its coast guard is trying to assert control over waters and atolls that are part of the Philippines, a US treaty ally. If China forces a confrontation over Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its own territory, the United States will need to respond decisively. The implications are enormous, potentially including a global economic crisis far worse than the shock caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Right now, America isn’t ready.”