By By Ihor Rosomakha
March 30th 2025
Something is happening behind closed doors—something that could shape the future of Ukraine, and by extension, the principles of global democracy. It’s not happening on the battlefield or in a UN chamber. It’s happening on paper.
At the center of the controversy is a proposed deal between the United States and Ukraine. On the surface, it appears to be a postwar investment agreement. But a closer look reveals something more troubling: an arrangement that would give the U.S. significant control over Ukraine’s valuable natural resources—everything from rare earth minerals to oil and gas—in exchange for repaying military aid already provided.
According to a Financial Times report, the draft agreement proposes that Ukraine commit “no less than 50% of extractive profits from state-owned subsoil resources” to a joint investment fund managed by U.S.-appointed trustees. That fund would essentially act as the repayment mechanism for the more than $123 billion in assistance the United States has delivered since Russia’s full-scale invasion began.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has spent the last three years trying to defend not only his country’s borders but its independence, is pushing back. “Nothing that could threaten Ukraine’s accession to the EU can be accepted,” he said at a recent press briefing. His concern isn’t only about economics. It’s about sovereignty.
And that matters, because for Ukraine, joining the European Union isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a strategic, generational goal—one that requires aligning with EU law, including rules that govern foreign control of national resources. Legal experts in Kyiv and Brussels have pointed out that the proposed deal likely violates key parts of the acquis Communautaire, the cumulative body of European Union law —specifically Articles 49 through 56, which uphold the principle of economic self-determination. The EU does not admit semi-autonomous protectorates. It accepts sovereign democracies.
Supporters of the agreement argue that military aid comes at a cost. That it’s only fair for a country receiving support to offer something in return. But this framing sidesteps the moral context. Aid to Ukraine was never meant to be transactional. It was a response to an illegal invasion, to the bombing of cities, and to a fight on behalf of democratic values. Turning that assistance into a retroactive bill—one paid in minerals—reframes the entire purpose of global solidarity.
It also sends a dangerous message to the rest of the world.
If the West begins to treat foreign aid as a resource-for-security trade, what message does that send to other frontline democracies? What do countries like Taiwan, Moldova, or Georgia learn from such a precedent? That help only comes when it can be monetized? That democracy is something to be leveraged, not defended?
The proposal also draws uncomfortable echoes from history—specifically, the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. That deal, signed between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, divided Eastern Europe into spheres of influence, allowing the two regimes to occupy and consume smaller nations without their consent. Ukraine was one of the countries carved up in the process.
This new minerals deal, of course, is not that. There are no tanks involved, no secret annexes describing territorial division. But the logic is eerily similar: a powerful country seeking long-term influence over a vulnerable one, not through war, but through contractual control.
That should concern anyone who believes in the idea of partnership among nations.
So far, the Biden administration has not endorsed the deal. And to be fair, the agreement was reportedly paused after backlash from Kyiv. But the fact that it was drafted and scheduled for signing—reportedly on February 28, 2025—raises serious questions about the direction of American foreign policy, and whether future administrations will continue to support Ukraine’s freedom, or begin charging for it.
What happens next matters.
Congress must scrutinize how such a deal was allowed to advance. European leaders must reaffirm that Ukraine’s sovereignty and EU path cannot be auctioned off under the guise of postwar recovery. And ordinary citizens—in Canada, the United States, and across the democratic world—must understand what’s really at stake.
Because if this deal or anything like it goes through, Ukraine won’t just be fighting off Russian aggression. It will be fighting to reclaim its independence from the very countries that pledged to defend it.
And if that happens—if Western democracies allow their support to curdle into ownership, if they demand repayment in resources instead of honoring the values that made the aid necessary in the first place—then the question won’t just be what kind of future Ukraine has.
It will be what kind of world we’ve allowed to return.
