Putin’s Ready to Offer the US a Deal on Rare-Earth Minerals.

When President Trump dressed-down Ukraine’s Zelenskyy at the White House recently, the Oval Office meeting was being televised around the globe. Undoubtedly, Russian President Vladimir Putin was watching, or he quickly viewed the event on youtube.

Zelenskyy had come to the White House to sign a deal that had been negotiated and finalized by both American and Ukrainian teams. All he had to do was to wear a suit, smile, and put wet ink on the document. Instead, he showed himself as smug and conceited. He insulted President Trump, Vice President Vance, and showed disrespect to the Oval Office by attempting to renegotiate the agreement on live TV. Then he made clear that he wasn’t willing to accept a ceasefire because he didn’t trust Putin to keep the deal. President Trump, who has repeatedly made clear that he wanted to broker a ceasefire in order to stop all the unnecessary deaths happening every day in the Russian-Ukrainian War, gave Zelenskyy a proper tongue-lashing, showed him the door, and told him not to come back until he was ready for peace.

Trump’s reprimand rebuked Zelenskyy’s behavior and made for some of the greatest TV in quite some time. This was a tour de force, a virtuoso performance, by America’s President, showing the whole world that the push-over Joe Biden had been was no longer running the show. Some European leaders, and certainly all Democrats, who had vociferously supported Zelenskyy were aghast in public, coming to Zelenskyy’s defense and criticizing Trump for disrespecting his guest, but privately they had to acknowledge that the White House was no longer occupied by a weak and ineffective leader.

What are rare-earths? We borrow this information from Wikipedia:

Rare-earth elements (REE) …are a set of 17 nearly indistinguishable lustrous silvery-white soft heavy metals. Compounds containing rare earths have diverse applications in electrical and electronic components, lasers, glass, magnetic materials, and industrial processes.

Though rare-earth elements are technically relatively plentiful in the entire earth’s crust … in practice this is spread thin across trace impurities, so to obtain rare earths at usable purity requires processing enormous amounts of raw ore at great expense, thus the name “rare” earths.

Rare-earths are valuable and expensive, and they are essential to the manufacture of many high-tech items.   According to the U.S. Geological Survey,

“Rare-earth elements (REE) are necessary components of more than 200 products across a wide range of applications, especially high-tech consumer products, such as cellular telephones, computer hard drives, electric and hybrid vehicles, and flat-screen monitors and televisions. Significant defense applications include electronic displays, guidance systems, lasers, and radar and sonar systems. Although the amount of REE used in a product may not be a significant part of that product by weight, value, or volume, the REE can be necessary for the device to function. For example, magnets made of REE often represent only a small fraction of the total weight, but without them, the spindle motors and voice coils of desktops and laptops would not be possible.”

The timing on this is interesting, because just a few days before the Oval Office meeting fell apart, Russian President Putin went public to suggest that a rare-earths deal with Russia was possible.

In the video below, Putin states that Russia’s rare-earth resources are “an order of magnitude” larger than Ukraine’s.  Putin continues, “Russia is one of the uncontested leaders when it comes to rare-earth metal resources.  Developing these resources requires substantial capital investment.  We would be happy to cooperate with any foreign partners, including American companies.”

But just maybe it is possible that now that the Ukrainian rare-earths deal with Ukraine has fallen apart, a new door might have opened for an alternate and perhaps better rare-earths deal with Russia.

We definitely need rare-earths, but we only need so much of them, and maybe’s there’s a better deal to be had with Russia, and a chance to do business with Russia may actually be far more helpful to world peace.

Maybe, though we are just hearing about this, there may have been talks going on behind the scenes, because the possibility of a rare-earths agreement with Russia had been brought up about a week before. Mr. Trump discussed the possibility of entering into several economic deals with Russia, particularly concerning the acquisition of Russian rare earths, during an Oval Office meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron.

Trump said that there were ongoing efforts to discuss several economic development agreements with Russia. Mr. Trump said that while he was unsure whether the trade discussions with Russia would be successful, he emphasized that the US wanted to pursue them if possible, especially with respect to rare earth resources.