Trump vows again to ‘get our money back’ in ‘rare earth’ deal with Ukraine without offering ‘very much’ security guarantees
At his first formal cabinet meeting on Tuesday, U.S. President Donald Trump reiterated his refusal to offer security guarantees to Ukraine, argued that this burden will fall exclusively to Kyiv’s European allies, and praised a looming deal with the Zelensky administration to secure American mining rights to Ukraine’s “rare earth.”
Trump on ‘getting our money back’
[Ukraine] is very important to everybody, but Europe is very close. We have a big ocean separating us. So, it's very important for Europe, and they hopefully will step up and do maybe more than they're doing and maybe a lot more.
The previous administration put us in a very bad position, but we've been able to make a deal where we're going to get our money back, and we're going to get a lot of money in the future, and I think that's appropriate because we have taxpayers that shouldn't be footing the bill, and they shouldn't be footing the bill more than the Europeans are paying. So, it's all been worked out. We're happy about it.
Trump on a peace deal to stop the killing
We're going to make a deal with Russia and Ukraine to stop killing people. They'll stop killing young Russian soldiers and young Ukrainian soldiers and other people in addition in the towns and cities. And we will consider that a very important thing and a big accomplishment because it was going nowhere. Until this administration came in, they hadn't spoken to President Putin in two years.
Trump on security guarantees and ‘rare earth’
Well, I’m not going to make security guarantees beyond very much. We're going to have Europe do that because […] Europe is their next-door neighbor, but we're going to make sure everything goes well, and as you know, we'll be really partnering with Ukraine in terms of rare earth.
We very much need rare earth. They have great rare earth. […] I mean, this gives us… Because we don't have that much of it here. We have some, but we don't have that much, and we need a lot more to really propel us to the next level, to lead in every way. We're leading right now with AI, we're leading with everything right now, but we need resources.