The U.S. Extorts the Minerals and Wealth of Ukraine

May 12, 2025

With a gun to its head, the Ukrainian government signed an agreement with the Trump administration to hand over much of the country’s wealth to U.S. corporations, banks and private equity investment firms.

Using extortion just like a Mafia gangster, the U.S. government threatened to withhold military weapons and the possibility of any security aid to Ukraine unless it gave U.S. corporations access to Ukraine’s natural resources. The U.S. will get a reported 50% of the proceeds from Ukraine’s mineral wealth which includes titanium, lithium, uranium and many “rare earth” metals which are essential to many modern industries. Trump said he expects hundreds of billions of dollars from this agreement.

But the U.S. exploitation of Ukraine goes far beyond that. The U.S. government will have joint control of an investment fund which will give U.S. corporations the contracts, and the large profits, of any rebuilding of the infrastructure which was destroyed in the war. The agreement gives U.S. corporations, bank and private equity the right to devour all of Ukraine’s natural resources, to control Ukraine’s fertile agricultural land and to profit off the labor of the Ukrainian working class.

The plans U.S. imperialism would make the Ukrainian people pay the price after the war, just as they paid the price during the war they did not start.

The U.S. government and its NATO allies provoked this war. For decades, the U.S. and NATO made overt military threats against Russia, right up to its borders. The U.S. trained and armed the Ukrainian military as another threat to Russia. When Putin responded and started his brutal invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. government under Biden gave the Ukrainian government the military weapons to keep the war going. The U.S. extended the war with the goal of weakening Russia, one’s of its competitors on the world stage.

Now the Trump administration is going in a different direction in Ukraine, but with the same goal—to benefit U.S. imperialism, and the people of Ukraine be damned.

During 3 years of war, much of Ukraine has been destroyed, millions of people have been uprooted from their homes; lives have been devastated; hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, and Russians, have died. The U.S. government said it was in Ukraine and kept the war going to help the people of Ukraine. The U.S. said it wanted to keep Russia from taking over Ukraine. Now the U.S. government and the U.S. capitalists it represents, plan to take Ukraine for themselves.