Russia, like US President Donald Trump, wants Ukraine's natural resources - and its forces are closing in on a giant lithium deposit, BTA reports.
This month, Trump said he wanted Kiev to hand over large quantities of critical minerals to the US in exchange for US military support, prompting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to say: "Let's make a deal". Yet as Washington and Moscow prepare for talks aimed at ending the three-year war, the reality is that Vladimir Putin is taking increasing control of Ukraine’s resources.
Russian forces, which have already seized a fifth of Ukraine’s territory, including rare earth reserves, are now just over 4 miles (6 kilometers) from the "Shevchenko" lithium deposit and are advancing on it from three directions, according to open-source data from the Ukrainian military blog "Deep State".
Lithium is a sought-after resource worldwide because of its use in a range of industries and technologies, from mobile phones to electric cars. Ukraine has reserves of about 500,000 tons, and Russia has twice that, according to U.S. government estimates.
"Shevchenko" is located in Donetsk, one of four Ukrainian regions that Moscow claims as its territory, the annexation of which Kiev and Western powers say is illegal. It is one of the largest lithium deposits in Ukraine and is at a depth that would allow for industrial extraction.
"Given the current pace of the battlefield, it is likely that the Russians will reach this area in the coming weeks," said Konrad Muzyka, director of the military consultancy "Roshan" in Poland, who has just returned from a fact-finding trip to Ukraine.
According to him, seizing Ukraine's mineral wealth, while not the main objective of the war, is among Russia's strategic goals. "The Ukrainian commanders I spoke to said that when you look at the direction and axis of the Russian attack, it's clear that their goal was also to seize natural resources," he added.
Vladimir Yezhikov, a senior Russian official in Donetsk, said that the mining division of Russia's state nuclear corporation Rosatom had shown interest in the Shevchenko field, but the Russian Ministry of Natural Resources would issue a mining license when the time came.
"It's hard to predict when that will happen, because for now the field is in the "gray zone" and there's no possibility of it being developed due to military operations," he told a local state news agency in January. "This field will definitely find its licensee. There will definitely be investment and lithium mining, and we would certainly like to see a processing process here.”
"Russia is winning the war"
Russian troops have been gaining ground in the east of the country for months, pouring vast resources into a relentless offensive.
Zelensky, speaking to Reuters in an interview this month, unfolded a once-secret map on his office table showing numerous mineral deposits, including a wide swath of land to the east marked as containing rare earth metals. About half of it appeared to be on the Russian side of the current front line.
The Ukrainian leader, who rejected an initial draft of a minerals deal with Trump, saying it did not include sufficient security guarantees, said he wanted to discuss with Trump the fate of resources in Russian-controlled territory.
He said Russia knew in detail the whereabouts of critical Ukrainian resources from Soviet-era geological surveys that were taken back to Moscow when Kiev gained independence in 1991. There are few reliable independent estimates of how much of Ukraine’s natural resources are currently controlled by Moscow. What is certain is that Ukraine is gradually losing control of its mineral wealth.
Vasily Koltashov, an economist and political analyst, says Trump’s desire for a grand deal on minerals will be academic if Ukraine loses the war.
"It is not he and his appetite for rare earths that will decide who gets what," he told Russian state television this month. "Russia is winning in the theater of war."
For many Russians, the seizure of Ukraine’s natural resources also represents a major prize in the conflict, which this month marks its third anniversary. Denis Pushilin, the senior Russian-backed official in Donetsk, sparked a flurry of triumphant headlines in the Russian press last month when he incorrectly claimed that the "Shevchenko" deposit had been captured, confusing it with the capture of another settlement of the same name elsewhere. "Ukraine’s largest lithium deposit is now under the control of Russian forces," the state-run newspaper "Rossiyskaya Gazeta" declared, for example.
"The minerals belong to the Russians"
The Kremlin’s public response has so far remained muted amid Trump’s attempts to lure Ukraine into a deal that would give the United States access to $500 billion worth of Ukrainian resources. dollars in exchange for US aid that has already been provided.
With the Putin-Trump summit approaching, as well as US-Russian talks to restore ties and consider ways to end the war, Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov limited himself to saying that the US president's proposal showed that he wanted Ukraine to pay for future US aid, rather than continue to receive it for free.
Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, was more harsh, accusing Zelensky of offering Washington resources it no longer controls, given the changes on the front lines. She also drew a parallel between Trump’s actions over Ukraine’s mineral wealth and the way the Nazi occupiers plundered the country.
"During World War II, the territory of the former Soviet Ukraine was seized and the Nazis set about plundering the republic’s national economy," she said at a media briefing this month. ""They stole the cattle from the territory of Ukraine and took away the black soil. Now all this is happening nonviolently because the Kiev regime is giving it all away."
Both Kiev and Washington have rejected accusations that the United States is unfairly trying to exploit Ukraine’s resource wealth, saying the resource deal is in their mutual interests in the areas of trade and security.
Russian military bloggers and nationalists have made it clear that they dislike what they see as Trump’s resource grab. "There is only one thing to say about this", blogger Starshe Eddy told his approximately 600,000 Telegram followers. "Don't grind your teeth on foreign food. The minerals of Ukraine belong to the Russian people and no one else."