President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, during a closed-door meeting on Wednesday, rejected an offer by the Trump administration to relinquish half of the country’s mineral resources in exchange for U.S. support, according to five people briefed on the proposal or with direct knowledge of the talks.
The unusual deal would have granted the United States a 50 percent interest in all of Ukraine’s mineral resources, including graphite, lithium and uranium, as compensation for past and future support in Kyiv’s war effort against Russian invaders, according to two European officials. A Ukrainian official and an energy expert briefed on the proposal said that the Trump administration also sought Ukrainian energy resources.
Negotiations are continuing, according to another Ukrainian official, who, like the others, spoke on the condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the talks. But the expansiveness of the proposal, and the tense negotiations around it, demonstrate the widening chasm between Kyiv and Washington over both continued U.S. support and a potential end to the war.
The request for half of Ukraine’s minerals was made on Wednesday, when the U.S. Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, met with Mr. Zelensky in Kyiv, the first visit by a Trump administration official to Ukraine. The Treasury Department declined to comment about any negotiation.
After seeing the proposal, the Ukrainians decided to review the details and provide a counterproposal when Mr. Zelensky visited the Munich Security Conference on Friday and met with Vice President JD Vance, according to the official.
It is not clear if a counterproposal was presented.
Mr. Zelensky, speaking to reporters in Munich on Saturday, acknowledged he had rejected a proposal from the Trump administration. He did not specify what the terms of the deal were, other than to say that it had not included security guarantees from Washington.
“I don’t see this connection in the document,” he said. “In my opinion, it’s not ready to protect us, our interests.”
The security guarantee is key, because Ukrainians believe the United States and Britain have failed to live up to their obligations to protect the country under an agreement signed at the end of the Cold War, when Ukraine gave up the Russian nuclear weapons on its territory.
European diplomats had another objection. They complained that the negotiation reeked of colonialism, an era when Western countries exploited smaller or weaker nations for commodities.
In Munich, a gulf also appeared over the Trump administration’s plans to end the war between the United States and its European allies. Many of them said they were more confused than before they had arrived.
A Ukrainian official and an energy expert briefed on Mr. Bessent’s offer said it covered not just half of Ukraine’s minerals, but also other natural resources such as oil and gas. The official also said the proposal gave the United States a claim to half of Ukraine’s earnings from resource extraction and the sale of new extraction licenses.
Acceding to these demands would deprive the Ukrainian government of millions of dollars in revenue that are currently almost entirely invested in the country’s defense. In the first half of last year, Naftogaz, Ukraine’s state-owned oil and gas giant, reported a profit exceeding half a billion dollars.
The idea of leveraging Ukraine’s mineral resources began to take shape last summer. Mr. Zelensky’s government, trying to appeal to Mr. Trump’s business-minded approach and fearing he would follow through on his promises to cut off military and financial aid to Ukraine, decided to pitch a deal that would essentially trade Ukrainian critical minerals for American aid.
The Ukrainian president presented the idea to Mr. Trump during a September meeting in New York, and the proposal gained backing from influential political figures, including Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican. It also came after U.S. businessmen — including as Ronald S. Lauder, a wealthy friend of Mr. Trump’s — showed interest in investing in Ukraine’s mineral resources.
Kyiv had always maintained that access to its natural resources would come in exchange for strong security guarantees from Washington. But one of the Ukrainian officials said that the proposal made no such commitment, instead framing the access to Ukraine’s resources as overdue payment for past American military and financial aid.
Ukraine has 109 significant mineral deposits, including those with ores of titanium, lithium and uranium, according to a list compiled by the Kyiv School of Economics, in addition to oil and natural gas fields. Some, though, are in territory already under Russian occupation or close to the front line.
Their value is uncertain. Apart from the risks of a repeat Russian invasion after a cease-fire — a risk a deal with the United States is intended to reduce — deeply entrenched problems in Ukraine’s business climate have hobbled investment for much of the country’s post-independence history.
These include arcane regulation and insider dealing by Ukrainian businessmen and politicians, which could limit any profits from the arrangement. Even before the war, few investors were takers on Ukrainian mining deals.
But there is precedent for Ukraine to mix security and business with the United States under Mr. Trump. In his first term, in 2017, he struck a deal for Ukraine to buy coal from Pennsylvania to replace coal from mines in Ukraine lost under Russian occupation after the 2014 invasion.
Kostiantyn Yelisieiev, a former diplomat and the deputy chief of staff under Ukraine’s president at the time the agreement was struck, recalled that the deal had allowed Mr. Trump to declare that he had saved jobs in Pennsylvania, a swing state. For Kyiv, the agreement opened the door for Mr. Trump to provide lethal military aid to Ukraine with the approval for sales of Javelin anti-tank missiles.
At the time, Ukrainian officials saw it as a success, Mr. Yelisieiev said. “It confirmed that Trump is not a person of values, but a person of interests and money,” and that Ukraine could find a way to work with him on security, he said.
But the deal under discussion now, he said, elevates the approach in ways that could hand Russia a propaganda win by casting the war as a battle for natural resources, not Ukrainian independence or democracy.
“It’s more important to say this is about protecting democracies and defeating Putin,” he said.
