Trump Finds a Face-Saving Way To Give Ukraine 'the Right To Fight On'

Forget boots on the ground. Now we’ll have Americans “on the land.”

If one thing is consistent about President Donald Trump's foreign policy, it's the feeling that America is getting ripped off. That feeling explains why he's sometimes a hawk and a dove at once, why he's been both for and against withdrawing from Afghanistan, why he wants to raise and lower oil supplies at the same time—and why he's against U.S. military aid to Ukraine.

"Think of it, a modestly successful comedian, [Ukrainian President] Volodymyr Zelenskyy, talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn't be won, that never had to start, but a War that he, without the U.S. and 'TRUMP,' will never be able to settle," Trump wrote on Truth Social earlier this month.

But Zelenskyy seems to have figured out how to satisfy Trump's feelings without changing much in the short term. Ukraine has agreed to put "50 percent of all revenues earned from the future monetization of all relevant Ukrainian Government-owned natural resource assets" into a U.S.-Ukrainian reconstruction fund, according to a copy of the deal leaked to The Kyiv Independent. Zelenskyy is expected to sign the deal on Friday.

In return, Ukraine gets "military equipment and the right to fight on," Trump told reporters on Tuesday. He added on Wednesday that "we will be on the land, and that way there is going to be automatic security because nobody is going to be messing around with our people," although he hinted that European countries will be responsible for any actual military deployments. 

Trump also bragged about being the first president to supply Ukraine with lethal weapons such as Javelin missiles. "I gave the Javelins, and the Javelins are the things that knocked out those tanks right at the beginning of the war. They said that—that [former President Barack] Obama, at the time, gave sheets, and Trump gave Javelins. Well, I was the one that did that," Trump told reporters on Wednesday.

Russian President Vladimir Putin brushed off the U.S.-Ukrainian deal, stating on television that Russians "undoubtedly have, I want to emphasize, significantly more resources of this kind than Ukraine."

The deal is a pretty good one for Ukraine, which is trading something in the future for military support in the present. The agreement explicitly excludes "current sources of revenues which are already part of the general budget revenues of Ukraine," meaning that Ukraine is only giving up a share of new resource projects. And even the U.S. share will be invested in Ukrainian reconstruction projects.

Trump's original demand was that Ukraine pay $500 billion, which Zelenskyy said "10 generations of Ukrainians will have to pay back." (In reality, the war has cost American taxpayers $182.8 billion and European taxpayers $138.7 billion, the BBC reports, citing figures from the U.S. Department of Defense and Germany's nonprofit Kiel Institute for World Economy.) The new deal doesn't mention either of the numbers Trump threw out, $350 billion or $500 billion.

Ukraine currently earns about $1.1 billion per year in natural resources. While the Ukrainian government has claimed to be sitting on massive deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals, the business press is more skeptical. "Another thing to note is that the world's top miners, who've spent much of the last two decades scouring the globe for untapped deposits of commodities, showed little interest in Ukraine before the war," Bloomberg News pointed out.

The country is also sitting on large gas reserves, but foreign attempts to invest in that gas have fallen through. Shell and Chevron pulled out of major Ukrainian shale gas projects in 2014, during the first Russian attacks on Ukraine, although the war may have been an excuse to give up on an investment with disappointing returns. For that matter, some of Ukraine's major mineral deposits are now under Russian occupation.

All this points to the main weakness in the agreement: It's a deal between the U.S. and Ukraine on sharing the burdens of war, not a deal between Russia and Ukraine to resolve the actual security issues causing the war. On the campaign trail, Trump had promised to end the war before even taking office. Instead, he's claiming victory over an agreement to keep the war going.

Zelenskyy himself sees the deal as a way to secure even bigger U.S. commitments down the road. "The success will depend on our talk with President Trump, if I understand the broader picture that he sees, if I understand this is all a part of broader security guarantees for Ukraine," the Ukrainian president told reporters on Wednesday.