Exclusive | Trump wants a deal for Ukraines natural resources as payback in exchange for aid stopping Russia attack: envoy

The US won’t repeat the mistakes of the Iraq War by failing to secure valuable resources from Ukraine in exchange for help ending Russia’s nearly three-year-old invasion, President Trump’s special envoy to the conflict exclusively told The Post.“When you look at the mineral deposits in that country, we’re not talking millions of dollars.We’re talking — virtually every region, we’re talking about billions, and then some regions are [worth] trillions,” retired Gen.

Keith Kellogg said this week.“You can come up with a deal, and that’s what [Trump] has the Treasury looking at: ‘OK, how do you make a deal where aid is predicated off of the payback [of] precious metals?'”Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday signaled support for a reciprocal resource deal with the US in exchange for security guarantees as part of a potential peace settlement.“If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelensky told Reuters.Zelensky has previously said Ukraine wants either NATO membership or nuclear rearmament to prevent Moscow from re-invading after the guns fall silent.Ukraine is home to roughly 5% of the world’s mineral resources, with rich deposits of titanium, uranium, iron, manganese and lithium — as well as rare earth minerals that are considered vital to US national security.“When we walked out of the Iraq War, we don’t have a single oil contract in Iraq proper — they’re all in Kurdistan,” Kellogg explained.“Nothing.

All the sacrifice went to no one.So I think the president is taking an economical look: ‘If you want to do this, there’s got to be something good for the American people,’ and that’s how he’s looking at it.”On Friday, Trump told reporters he intended to meet with Zelensky next week and indicated he was interesting in discussing Ukraine’s resources and obtaining “an equal amount of something” in exchange for American backing.“We would like them to equalize,�...