A Comparison of the Deals Given to Ukraine

So, in working towards the peaceful resolution of the conflict in Ukraine, president Donald Trump signed a minerals deal with Ukraine, in exchange for US support. In essence, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky met US President Trump in Washington to sign an agreement that would give the US access to its deposits of rare earth minerals. But after Zelensky left early following a fiery exchange with Trump and Vice-President JD Vance, the White House announced that the deal had not been signed. Zelensky previously said he hoped the “preliminary” agreement with the US would “lead to further deals”, but confirmed no US security guarantees had yet been agreed – something he had been pushing for. Trump had said a deal would help US taxpayers “get their money back” for aid sent to Ukraine throughout the war, but said the responsibility of Kyiv’s security should fall to Europe. This was objectively, the best deal that Ukraine has had from the US and even Europe. Well today, we ought to address the consequences of the incident in the oval office, and compare the deals given to Ukraine.
Starmer Urges Action at Defense Meeting as European Leaders Unite on Ukraine
 During a defense meeting on Ukraine, Sir Keir Starmer emphasized the urgency of taking action, describing the moment as a rare opportunity for European security. The gathering at Lancaster House in London saw leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron and NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, come together to forge a unified position on resolving the conflict. The meeting came after tensions were heightened by a tense exchange between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House on last week Friday, which caused friction between the U.S. and its European counterparts.
Russia’s Lavrov Praises President Trump’s Pragmatic Approach to Ukraine Conflict
Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister of Russia, commended U.S President Donald Trump for his pragmatic handling of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Lavrov characterized President Trump as a pragmatic who makes decisions based on common sense. Speaking about events like colonization, Napoleon Bonaparte, World War I, and Adolf Hitler, he also added that Europe has been at the epicenter of world issues for the past 500 years.
PREVIOUS DIPLOMATIC DEALS AND OPPORTUNITIES THAT UKRAINE HAD BEEN OFFERED BY RUSSIA
And now onto our main discussion, on the comparison of deals given to Ukraine and we ought to start with the deal given to Ukraine by Europe (which would include Russia, because it quickly foreshadowed an agreement between Ukraine and Russia that would have prevented a war between Russia and Ukraine. So, prior to the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, Vladimir Putin offered an opportunity for diplomatic talks between Ukraine, the west and Russia to ensure a Ukraine-centric focus in addressing the turbulent and fragile political climate at the time.
But, then the active complicity of the US government in the coup was discovered, and was overwhelming. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland was caught on a phone line in January 2014 plotting the change of government in Ukraine. Meanwhile, US Senators went personally to Kiev to stir up the protests. On February 21, 2014, the Europeans, US, and Russia brokered a deal with Yanukovych in which Yanukovich agreed to early elections. Yet the coup leaders reneged on the deal the same day, took over government buildings, threatened more violence, hence they deposed Yanukovych the next day. The US supported the coup and immediately extended recognition to the new government.
Then, in the course of 2014, Putin called repeatedly for a negotiated peace, and this led to the Minsk II Agreement in February 2015 based on autonomy of the Donbas and an end to violence by both sides. Russia did not claim the Donbas as Russian territory, but instead called for autonomy and the protection of ethnic Russians within Ukraine. The UN Security Council endorsed the Minsk II agreement, but the US neocons privately subverted it. In fact, years later, Chancellor Angela Merkel blurted out the truth. The Western side treated the agreement not as a solemn treaty but as a delaying tactic to “give Ukraine time” to build its military strength. But, in the meantime, around 14,000 people died in the fighting in Donbas between 2014 and 2021.
THE PRO-WAR DEAL OFFERED TO UKRAINE BY BORIS JOHNSON
Well, following the collapse of the Minsk II agreement, Putin again proposed negotiations with the US in December 2021. By that point, the issues went even beyond NATO enlargement to include fundamental issues of nuclear armaments. Step by step, the US warmongers had abandoned nuclear arms control with Russia, with the US unilaterally abandoning the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002, placing missiles in Poland and Romania in 2010 onwards, and walking out of the Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) Treaty in 2019. In view of these dire concerns, Putin put on the table on December 15, 2021 a draft “Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Security Guarantees.” The most immediate issue on the table (Article 4 of the draft treaty) was the end of the US attempt to expand NATO to Ukraine.
Following this, was the incident in March 2022, when Russia and Ukraine nearly closed a peace deal just weeks after the start of Russia’s special military operation that began on February 24, 2022. Russia, once again, was after one big thing: Ukraine’s neutrality, meaning, no NATO membership and no hosting of US missiles on Russia’s border. Ukraine’s President Vladimir Zelensky quickly accepted Ukraine’s neutrality, and Ukraine and Russia exchanged papers, with the skillful mediation of the Foreign Ministry of Turkey. BUT, then suddenly, at the end of March, Ukraine abandoned the negotiations. And this was after then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson actually flew to Kiev to warn Zelensky against neutrality and the importance of Ukraine defeating Russia on the battlefield.
Why did Europe counterpropose war as opposed to peace achieved through diplomacy? Well, because they were representing the NATO agenda, which was premised on the US’s objectives to dismantle Russia. More specifically, (as you’d recall from previous discussions) since the end of the Cold War, the US’s grand strategy has been to weaken Russia. As early as 1992, then Defense Secretary Richard Cheney opined that following the 1991 demise of the Soviet Union, Russia too should be dismembered. A Zbigniew Brzezinski opined in 1997 that Russia should be divided into three loosely confederated entities in Russian Europe, Siberia, and the far east. Well, in light of this, the 30-year US project, hatched originally by Cheney and collaborating neocons, was carried forward consistently since then, and it has been hinged on a desire to weaken or even dismember Russia, surround Russia with NATO forces, and depict Russia as the belligerent power.
All of this is to say that (1) before the conflict became a violent proxy war, Russia put diplomacy on the plate a number of times. (2) This, however, was overshadowed by the US’s objectives to destroy Russia, and Europe’s insistence that Ukraine build military strength and defeat Russia on the battlefield. Interestingly enough, defeating Russia on the battlefield was never a possibility for Ukraine and NATO (which the status quo testifies of). NATO based its assumed success of this war as a means of weakening Russia on the misguided idea that Russia was militarily incapable of a prolonged war, and that economic sanctions would weaken an economic capacity to finance the war. And yet, Russia has a strong military, and a loaf of bread in Russia costs less than it does in the US. IN FCAT, these previous deals offered to Ukraine by the European part of NATO expose that Europe has a pro-war agenda, that has consistently hamstrung peace between Russia and Ukraine. But, here’s Scott Ritter detailing why it should have never been assumed that Russia’s military would not manage a prolonged war, and he made these remarks when Biden was president, and was positioning the US to “support Ukraine” in the conflict with Russia.
WHAT DID THE US-UKRAINE MINERALS DEAL ENTAIL?
Let’s then address the recent deal offered to Ukraine, which is the minerals deal put forth by president Donald Trump. As we established earlier, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky met US President Trump in Washington to sign an agreement that would give the US access to its deposits of rare earth minerals. Zelensky previously said he hoped the “preliminary” agreement with the US would “lead to further deals”. Trump had also said a deal would help US taxpayers “get their money back” for aid sent to Ukraine throughout the war. Again – this was objectively, the best deal that Ukraine has had from the US and Europe combined, especially with respect to now ending the conflict, which has been president Trump’s promulgated goal, evidenced by the fact that he had diplomatic talks with Russia on the very subject, which is something that NATO states had avoided, while pretending they want peace. Here’s president Trump presenting a synopsis of the deal.
UNPACKING THE HEATED DISAGREEMENT AT THE OVAL OFFICE
However, after Zelensky left early following a fiery exchange with Trump and Vice-President JD Vance, the White House then announced that the deal had not been signed. Which makes security guarantees from the US, in the course of negotiating a peaceful resolution, less likely.
Let’s address two points here. First, Russia did not illegally occupy Ukrainian territories in 2014, and Russia did not invade Ukraine. It instituted a special military operation, with the objective to defend the Russian-speaking territories in eastern Ukraine—being the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic—under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Russian speakers in the region had been at war with Ukraine since 2014, and Russia had recently become the first state to recognize them as independent. Putin also exposed that Ukraine had been committing genocide against Russian speakers in the region; that Ukraine’s government were neo-Nazis under Western control; also that Ukraine was developing nuclear weapons; and that NATO was building up military infrastructure in Ukraine, threatening Russia. Meanwhile, Ukraine had failed to respect the terms of a referendum for Crimea’s democratically expressed intent to be part of Russia in 2014, having done the same with the referendum in Donetsk and Luhansk in 1994.
Secondly, based on the negotiations and deal alongside Macron and Angela Merkel, well, Zelensky is not entirely correct about what transpired, because this actually deals with the 2 Minsk Agreements. The Minsk agreements were a series of international agreements which sought to end the Donbas war fought between armed Russian separatist groups and Armed Forces of Ukraine, with Russian regular forces playing a central part. The first, known as the Minsk Protocol, was drafted in 2014 by the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine, consisting of Ukraine, Russia, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), with mediation by the leaders of France and Germany in the so-called Normandy Format. After extensive talks in Minsk, Belarus, the agreement was signed on 5 September 2014 by representatives of the Trilateral Contact Group and, without recognition of their status, by the then-leaders of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR). This agreement followed multiple previous attempts to stop the fighting in the region and aimed to implement an immediate ceasefire.
The agreement, however, failed to stop fighting, and was thus followed with a revised and updated agreement, Minsk II, which was signed on 12 February 2015. This agreement consisted of a package of measures, including a ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons from the front line, release of prisoners of war, constitutional reform in Ukraine granting self-government to certain areas of Donbas and restoring control of the state border to the Ukrainian government. While fighting subsided following the agreement’s signing, it never ended completely, and the agreement’s provisions were never fully implemented.
In September 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin then announced the independence of the regions after meeting with the Russian Security Council, following a video appeal by the regions’ separatist leaders for the recognition of independence. But, it appeared that Russia’s recognition of the independence of the regions in effect ended the Minsk Agreements, which were never fully implemented due to numerous violations from both sides. And so, the agreements, which were signed in 2014 and 2015, had called for a large amount of autonomy for the two regions within Ukraine. More specifically, the implementation order of political and military steps was one of the conditions upon which Russia and Ukraine disagreed: while Russia argued that elections in the separatist republics needed to come before the withdrawal of military equipment, Ukraine insisted on the opposite. But, despite the challenges, diplomatic measures were actually explored, and notably with the intention of giving effect to the democratically expressed call for autonomy from the Russian speaking inhabitants of the Donbas and Luhansk regions.
THE DISAGREEMENT AT THE OVAL OFFICE TURNS LINDSAY GRAHAM AGAINST ZELENSKYY
This brings us to one notable remark on the oval office exchange. You’d recall that we discussed that trump-opposed Lindsey Graham had voiced out the US agenda in Ukraine, in that he confessed that Ukraine is a veritable “gold mine,” and that America cannot afford to lose control of it. Well, the translation of Graham’s admission is that he is emphatically admitting that the proxy war in Ukraine is also about the money’. In fact, he made this admission on CBS’s “Face the Nation. Have a listen.
Well this matters even today because one of the most striking things about Zelensky’s press conference at the oval office was Lindsey Graham’s reaction to it. The two are old friends, but Graham disavowed him in a manner that screams scapegoating. Here’s why: the Ukrainians sold huge quantities of American weapons on the international black market at twenty cents on the dollar. These weapons are now in the hands of armed groups around the world, including Hamas, the Mexican drug cartels and the forces now controlling Syria. In the new Trump administration, this is all likely to come out, and it appears that the same Lindsay Graham whose nurture a relationship with Zelenskyy and even advocated for more aid to Ukraine (despite it not necessarily being used for the war) is now deciding that it is better to start blaming Zelensky for trouble in Ukraine. In any case, it appears teh hostilities are now mutual.
ADDRESSING ZELENSKYY’S QUESTION: WHAT IF RUSSIA STRIKES AGAIN?
Let’s also address the question on whether Putin will break diplomacy? No, there isn;t a personally conceived benefit for Russia. What it wants is the protection of Russian speakers, who have expressed they do not wish to be part of Ukraine. Secondly, he wants NATO to keep its side of the agreement where it does not expand eastward further towards its borders. HOWEVER, if Putin does strike in the midst of peace negotiations, that is where the security guarantees through the minerals deal would have been beneficial. And yet, after the exchange at the oval office, Zelensky went to the same European leaders that have strong armed him into a war that he is losing.
Written by Lindokuhle Mabaso