“It’s not just Trump.” Mark Curtis reports on the U.K.’s scramble for Ukraine’s natural resources.
U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy looking up at Ukrainian flags while visiting Kiev on Feb. 5. (Ben Dance / FCDO /CC BY 2.0)
By Mark Curtis
Declassified UK
When U.K. officials signed a 100-year partnership with Ukraine in mid-January, they claimed to be Ukraine’s “preferred partner” in developing the country’s “critical minerals strategy.”
Yet within a month, U.S. President Donald Trump had presented a proposal to Ukraine’s President Volodymr Zelensky to access the country’s vast mineral resources as “compensation” for U.S. support to Ukraine in the war against Russia.
Whitehall was none too pleased about Washington muscling in.
When Foreign Secretary David Lammy met Zelensky in Kyiv last month he reportedly raised the issue of minerals, “a sign that [Keir] Starmer’s government is still keen to get access to Ukraine’s riches”, the iPaper reported.
Lammy earlier said, in a speech last year:
“Look around the world. Countries are scrambling to secure critical minerals, just as great powers once raced to control oil.”
The U.K. foreign secretary was correct, but Britain itself is one of those powers, and Ukraine is one of the major countries U.K. officials — as well as the Trump administration — have their eyes on.
It’s no surprise why. Ukraine has around 20,000 mineral deposits covering 116 types of minerals such as beryllium, manganese, gallium, uranium, zirconium, rare earth metals and nickel.
The country, whose economy has been devastated by Russia’s brutal war, also possesses one of the world’s largest reserves of graphite, the largest titanium reserves in Europe, and a third of the continent’s lithium deposits.
These resources are key for industries such as military production, high tech, aerospace, and green energy.
In recent years, the Ukrainian government has sought to attract foreign investment to develop its critical mineral resources and signed strategic partnerships and held investment fora to showcase its mining opportunities.
The country has also begun auctioning exploration permits for minerals such as lithium, copper, cobalt and nickel, offering lucrative investment opportunities.
Media narratives largely parrot the U.K. government’s interests in Ukraine being about standing up to aggression. But Whitehall has in the past few years stepped up its interest in accessing the world’s critical minerals, not least in Ukraine.
‘Critical Minerals Work’
Map of minerals of Ukraine, 2022. (Zbigniew Dylewskie / Wikimedia Commons /CC BY 3.0)
Nusrat Ghani, a trade minister in Rishi Sunak’s government, held at least 10 meetings on the subject of critical minerals in 2023 and the first half of 2024, government transparency data shows.
Among the companies she met were giant U.K. mining corporations Rio Tinto and Anglo American, and arms exporter BAE Systems and military aerospace lobbyists, ADS.
It is not clear if Ukraine was the subject of these discussions but one other prominent firm Ghani met to discuss “mineral supply chains” was Rothschilds, which has extensive interests in Ukraine.
Rothschild & Co Bank’s London offices in the New Court building. (Adrian Welch /Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.5)
Ghani held a discussion with the Paris-headquartered global advisory firm in April 2023 while her successor Alan Mak did so the following year in May. Mak met the firm “to discuss Rothschild’s critical minerals work,” the data show.
The corporation was invited to the 2023 Ukraine Recovery Conference held in London and is a member of the U.K.-Ukraine Finance Partnership. It has also been the main adviser to the Ukrainian Ministry of Finance since 2017.
Rothschilds, on whose board sits former U.K. National Security Adviser Lord Mark Sedwill, has no less than $53 billion invested in Ukraine.
‘British-Ukrainian Partnership’
(GOV.UK)
Writing recently in Unherd, researcher Sang-Haw Lee quotes a senior Labour figure saying the U.K. was involved in extensive negotiations for the whole of last year relating to securing exclusive access to Ukraine’s minerals, but that adequate government support was not forthcoming.
Some other meetings have crept into the public domain. Last April, two prominent U.K. parliamentarians met one of Ukraine’s largest mining investment companies in London to discuss “British-Ukrainian partnership in the field of critical minerals mining.”
BGV Group, which has investments of $100 million in Ukrainian mining projects, held discussions with then energy minister, Lord Martin Callanan, and Bob Seely, then a Conservative MP who sat on Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee.
The company is seeking investors for its graphite and beryllium projects and said in a media release that “Ukraine has all the prerequisites to become one of Britain’s main suppliers of critical minerals crucial for advanced technologies and the green energy transition.”
“As Ukraine’s ultimate European ally, the U.K. could leverage its strong position within NATO to help secure mining sites and transportation routes”, writes Andriy Dovbenko, the founder of U.K.-Ukraine TechExchange.
‘Vast Resources’
The U.K. government’s “Ukraine Business Guide” notes that “Ukraine has vast resources” and “a rich mineral base of iron ore, manganese, coal, and titanium.”
Certainly, enhancing access to critical minerals has been a broad priority across Whitehall over the last three years.
The U.K. produced its first-ever Critical Minerals Strategy in 2022 and updated this with a refresh” the following year. It identifies 18 minerals with “high criticality” for the U.K., including several present in Ukraine, such as graphite, lithium and rare earth elements.
The U.K.’s strategy aims, among other things, to “support U.K. companies to participate overseas” in supply chains for these minerals and “champion London as the world’s capital of responsible finance for critical minerals.”
As part of its critical minerals strategy, the government set up a so-called Task & Finish group, analysing the risks to U.K. industry, and including participants from BAE, Rio Tinto and ADS. The group highlights titanium, rare earth elements, cobalt and gallium as among the minerals with a supply risk to the U.K. military sector.
Zelenskyy pouring water for Starmer during a NATO Ukraine Council session at the military alliance’s summit in Washington, D.C., in July 2024. Then President Joe Biden and NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg on right. (Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
The U.K. has also launched a Critical Mineral Intelligence Centre and established a Critical Minerals Expert Committee to advise the government.
A report by the Foreign Affairs Committee on critical minerals published in December 2023 concluded that “the U.K. cannot afford to leave itself vulnerable on supply chains that are of such strategic importance.”
A sign of how seriously the government is taking the issues is that it says it will “ensure consideration for critical minerals is embedded” in the free trade agreements it is negotiating with a range of countries.
‘Regulatory Structures’
Starmer and Zelenskyy in Kiev in January when they signed a 100-year partnership agreement. (Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street/ Flickr/ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Accessing minerals overseas often depends on loosening government regulations to enable foreign corporations to strike favourable deals.
The 100-year partnership declaration commits the U.K. and Ukraine to “supporting development of a Ukrainian critical minerals strategy and necessary regulatory structures required to support the maximisation of benefits from Ukraine’s natural resources, through the possible establishment of a Joint Working Group.”
The thrust of the partnership is to “support a more enabling environment for private sector participation in the clean energy transition” and to “attract investments of British companies in the development of renewable energy sources.”
More generally, the two sides will “work together to boost and modernise Ukraine’s economy by progressing reforms that aim to attract private finance” and “boost investor confidence.”
As Declassified recently showed, British aid to Ukraine is focused on promoting these pro-private sector reforms and on pressing the government in Kyiv to open up its economy to foreign investors.
Foreign Office documents on its flagship aid project in Ukraine, which supports privatisation, note that the war provides “opportunities” for Ukraine delivering on “some hugely important reforms.”
The U.K. supports a project called SOERA (State-owned enterprises reform activity in Ukraine), which is funded by USAID with the U.K. Foreign Office as a junior partner.
SOERA works to “advance privatization of selected SOEs [state-owned enterprises], and develop a strategic management model for SOEs remaining in state ownership.”
U.K. documents note the programme has already “prepared the groundwork” for privatisation, a key plank of which is to change Ukraine’s legislation.
“SOERA worked hand-in-hand with GoU and proposed 25 pieces of legislation of which 13 were adopted and implemented,” the most recent documents note.
‘Geostrategic Rivalries’
Much U.K. foreign policy and wars can be explained by Whitehall wanting British corporations to get their hands on other countries’ resources.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq was mainly about oil while decades earlier the U.K.’s brutal war in Malaya in the 1950s was substantially about rubber. Britain’s support for apartheid South Africa is significantly explained by the U.K. wanting continued access to South Africa’s massive mineral resources.
But the main concern now is China, which is the biggest producer of 12 out of the 18 minerals assessed by the U.K. as critical.
The Ministry of Defence’s major geopolitical forecast, its “Global Strategic Trends,” released last year, makes 57 mentions of minerals, noting that they “will become of increasing geopolitical importance” and could lead to “new geostrategic rivalries and tensions.”
History suggests that Whitehall’s international strategy on critical minerals, and its scramble for Ukraine’s, will continue to shape U.K. foreign policy and contribute to these future international tensions.
Mark Curtis is the director of Declassified UK, and the author of five books and many articles on U.K. foreign policy.
This article is from Declassified UK.
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Whenever a war happens it likely is the result of economic hardship in western life and times provoke for the religion of development rites. It is a form of maximized profits on maximized human pain and suffering
It will be interesting to see how the competition between US and UK corp unfolds – usually what seems to happen is one buys out the others – nobody loses except the land and the people who live there .. and the politicians all do fine, including Zelensky, wonder how much he will be making off the deal …
Well, now that Trump is involved, our “special relationship” ally should be concerned if not outright terrified. His modus operandi in any negotiation has always been to crush any other party in the negotiation and emerge the winner. No compromise. Certainly no win-win. Winner takes all.
Interesting article. Also, quite amusing envisioning a war between the UK and the US over spoils of the most provoked war in American history (goes back to the Clintons), with no consideration of the millions of dead Ukrainians and their remaining population. This should be fun. One dead and one dying empire at odds.
Another war over econ control of natural resour…er, I mean “freedom and democracy” of course.
Most interesting. As often as I am told that the again-Russian oblosks contain most of the minerals, this map shows a large minority of deposits west of the Dneiper. That appears to explain Western interest.
England still seems to miss the fact that it has become largely a Russian decision whether or for how long or to what extent these areas stay under Ukrainian jurisdiction.
Russia cannot let American or NATO missiles into the area, and letting troops in would make inspections related to missiles difficult to carry out. We should remember also that laboratories related to biological warfare were found in Eastern Ukraine, and similar could conceivably be the greater threat, since it might be easier to pretend for longer that a release were accidental, allowing for a sort of “first-strike” capability.
On the optimistic side, this might constitute a motive for the West to not allow Russia to simply grind through the entirety of Ukraine in the absence of a more authentic peace proposition–something that does not involve a Ukraine with NATO troops, missiles, or de-facto member status.
One wonders how attached the Rothchilds might be to having a Western government control such things, though. They might prefer to have the Russians administer the entirety, since that might eventually create some measure of stability.
As usual, people often don’t know Putin’s goals for the SMO. Three things: 1. Denazify because after the 2014 coup by the US, followed by 8 years of the Nazi Azov Battalion, Right Sector, Stepan Binderites murdering 14000 Russian speakers in the Donbas. 2. Keep Crimea which has been Russian since 1783 and is their only warm water port for the Russian Navy. 3. Keep NATO out of the last Russian border without it, since the US lied when it said NATO would not move “one inch” eastward if Germany could unite. Of course no one can name any time the US kept its word, promise, treaty, agreement, pact or any other promise it has given. As Gorbachev said, “You can’t trust the Americans.” Russia is the only sane country involved in the Ukraine. It has never wanted to go further than these three accomplishments. You also must know that the Donbas and Crimea vote almost 97% to be in the Russian Federation. That’s enough for the first two goals to automatically be reached. Also, NATO is just a US aggressive organization and should have been demolished a long time ago.
You write “this map shows a large minority of deposits west of the Dneiper”. Where does this map come from? Wikipedia lists its source as ‘Ukraina, bogaty kraj biednych ludzi, 2020’ (‘Ukraine, rich country of poor people’ according to Google Translate), with a link to youtu.be/jSVxuQox_PA, a video of the same name. The video’s by one Zbigniew Dylewski, a Polish economist whose Youtube channel (youtube.com/@dylewski1) seems devoted to Polish/Ukrainian nationalism.
Is this a reliable source, especially when Bloomberg, Reuters, IEEE Spectrum and others all say Ukraine’s mineral wealth has been grossly exaggerated? Ukraine’s noted for corruption at te best of times, and now there’s plenty of people within and outside the country with added motives for misrepresentation.
It seems to me Zelensky couldn’t agree to Trump’s deal because of the sneaky Brits. Scott Ritter was saying that a promise of security was part of the British deal on the assumption Trump and America would be no worse off providing the security part indefinitely for nothing. Starmer’s and Zelensky’s odd-ball behaviors make sense now.
The Brits do not want any possibility of being caught on the wrong side of a Piracy Gap!!!
If the UK manages to get any minerals, will China accept the contract to DO something with them?
Many of these claims about Ukraine’s mineral wealth, especially its rare earth deposits, may be little more than marketing, propaganda, or wishful thinking. See, for example:
IEEE Spectrum, ‘Rare Earths Reality Check: Ukraine Doesn’t Have Minable Deposits’, 7 March
Reuters, ‘Critical minerals take centre stage in world politics’, March 3
The Telegraph, ‘Ukraine’s rare earth mineral wealth barely exists’, 24 February
Bloomberg, ‘Rare Earths in Ukraine? No, Only Scorched Earth.’, 19 February
From the Reuters article, for instance:
“If Ukraine has a lot of rare earths, it’s news to the U.S. Geological Survey, which doesn’t include the country in its list of either top producers or largest reserves.” and “Ukraine does have confirmed reserves of other critical metals such as titanium and lithium but getting them out of the ground is a whole bigger challenge.”
And, as two commenters have already pointed out below, such minerals as the Ukraine does have in forms and quantities worth mining are mostly in territory currently under Russian control.
I should add that, despite their titles, the IEEE, Telegraph, and Bloomberg articles also address Ukraine’s critical minerals generally, not just its rare earths.
Ukrainians and Russians, two brother nations, lost this war the moment it started. It was also pretty much obvious that the only people profiting from it were in the West and now we see who will be profiting after the war ends – not that anyone here had any doubts, I suppose. Ukraine is their new colony, up to its neck in debt and with a frozen conflict, both of which will make it unstable and its goverments nicely corrupt to allow the corporates to do whatever they please.
Good assessment of the winners and losers in this war. However, there is one group that has lost far more than any other and that is the people of Ukraine. 1. They elected Zelinsky as President largely due to his stated intent to stop the civil war going on since the Washington DC led coup in 2014. Zelinsky did a 180° on them. He was not strong enough to curb the crazy Nazis in the Ukrainian government and military. 2. When Zelinsky was talked into going to war with Russia, he had one “asset” to bring to the proxy war table. That was a large supply of cannon fodder to be used by Western governments to harm Russia.
It seems humans are incapable of learning from the past. We are spending ourselves into poverty to threaten each other over resources for profit for the already obscenely wealthy. It’s the 18th century with 21st century technology. I wonder how it will turn out?
It was Zelensky who initially approached Trump with an offer to cut a deal allowing US Corporations to have access to Ukraine’s “rare earths” back in September.
Looking at the map, the areas containing high concentrations of mineral resources are currently controlled by Russia.
The map shows that by far the largest deposits are in the once-Ukrainian oblasts that are now the Russian territories of Luhansk and Donetsk. It seems the British Empire is alive in modified form where the British profoteers do not occupy territory but still parasitically control, or seek to control, the resources of other nations. Reportedly they also try to indebt other nations, as we do through the IMF and World Bank, to exert control over the resources and labor (humans) of other nations.