The whole “rare earth” and “minerals” thing, as presented, just doesn’t make sense.
The USA and North America have plenty of all these minerals. The real problem is 1) the average time to permit a new mine is 12 years - if at all and 2) we allowed China to take over the advanced processing of these minerals, due to environmental concerns, NIMBY, desire to buy cheap Chinese stuff. China now is most advanced in metallurgy and they also have the downstream products using these minerals.
So Ukraine has these minerals in the ground. So do we. That means nothing. The mines don’t exist, the processing plants don’t exist, the technology and applied science don’t exist, and the end use mass-manufacturing doesn’t exist.
As I said - doesn’t make sense.
I’ve read conflicting reports about our actually having the rare earth minerals.
Our having Uke’s REMs will keep ChyNah from having them.
It doesn’t make sense to me, either. Trump himself recently remarked “who knows what they’re worth?” and “maybe they’re not worth anything.”
As best I understand it, and I’m certainly no expert, these “rare earth minerals” are sprinkled all over the planet, but only in some locations can they be profitably extracted. From what I have read, only China, Russia and the USA have the necessary technology needed to process these minerals.
Back to it making no sense. It struck me as some sort of game being played, more kabuki theater. I mused about it here:
https://freerepublic.com/focus/news/4299716/posts?page=47#47
Since then, it’s come out that other assets like gas and oil and the operation of ports has been added to the minerals in the deal. There are rumors that the mineral rights have already been bought up by Blackrock and similar outfits, rumors that Zelensky already promised them to Starmer in that goofy 100 year deal. It’s all just weird.
Maybe Trump hopes to save Ukraine’s remaining coastline with the ports portion of the deal? We built a port for them after they lost Crimea and ran NATO exercises out of it. Hey Vlad, those are our ports now, so hands off. I have no idea.
Maybe it will eventually make sense. Or not. Right now, I just can’t quite figure it out.
(For more context, see my earlier posts on this thread.)