Natural resource grabbing in Ukraine and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Imperial powers on the offensive.

Ukraine’s natural resources coveted by the United States, Russia and the EU

David Otieno, of the Kenyan Peasants’ League, a member organization of both the CADTM and Via Campesina networks, asked me the following question about Ukraine’s debt.

“Comrade Eric, when I recently heard about Trump’s proposal on using Ukraine’s minerals as collateral to funding the war, I remembered your article of early January 2025 entitled ‘Ukraine’s Debt: an instrument of pressure and spoliation in the hands of creditors’, elaborating on how the EU plan and to a larger extent US plan then focused on hinging on Ukrainian Debts and wealth to unlock resources to support the war.

Is the current Trump plan fundamentally different from the earlier plan by EU and Biden regime? If No, How?”

My answer is as follows.

In my January 2025 article, I explained that Ukraine’s greatest debt is to the EU, at a total of a little over USD 50 billion [1]. The EU, that likes to come across as generous, grants huge loans to Ukraine instead of making donations. It makes donations in the form of arms but all other financial assistance is in the form of loans that Ukraine will have to start to repay one day, and the amounts are considerable. As I see it, the EU intends to use what Ukraine owes as a means of forcing that country into giving access to its natural resources. The dominant powers of Europe are Germany and France. To these could be added Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and other countries. All these countries and their business corporations obviously hope to profit from their relationship with Ukraine that has huge tracts of good-quality arable land.

Indeed, Ukraine and Russia are two of the world’s biggest wheat exporters. [2] They export massively to Senegal, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.

They export cereals because Sub-Saharan African countries, once self-sufficient in cereals, have been pushed into abandoning subsistence crops in favour of export (cash) crops. For example, in the 1940-1950s, Senegal was pushed into producing groundnuts, while for Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire it was cocoa. All this to the detriment of subsistence crops, in particular local cereals. Thus have Sub-Saharan and North African countries become increasingly dependent on imports from Ukraine and Russia to feed their populations.

In eastern Ukraine, there are large mining areas. Russia has, de facto, annexed large swathes of this region of Ukraine known as the Donbass. As for the EU, it seeks to get its hands on the central and western part of Ukraine, as much for the arable land as for the rare earths found there, essential for the conversion of its automobile industry to electric vehicles and more generally, for the so-called “green capitalism”. The EU’s private agrobusiness companies are avid to get their hands on large tracts of very fertile land. To achieve their ends, EU leaders have decided to instrumentalize Ukraine’s debt and its desire to join the EU. What the EU is basically saying to the Ukrainian population and Zelensky’s government is, “If you want to join the EU, you must open up your markets completely, allow European foreign companies to buy Ukrainian land and minerals and to get concessions to exploit underground mineral deposits”. Moreover, this is precisely how the governments of the major powers and the companies based in Europe, the United States and China deal with African governments. They instrumentalize official aid and debt.

The Trump offensive to acquire a share of Ukraine’s natural resources

When I wrote my article on Ukraine in January 2025, Trump had not yet announced what he wanted from Ukraine. What I wrote referred to the policies of the Biden administration, in power during the period following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That invasion began on 24 February 2022. President Biden provided financial and military aid in the form of donations, unlike the European leaders.

In exchange for these donations, Biden wanted to make Ukraine structurally dependent on the United States against Russia in the present and the future. He was also hoping to gain access to natural resources, using the fact that the United States had been “very generous” towards Ukraine as a means of persuasion. However, Biden had not yet adopted an aggressive strategy to get access to the natural resources; whereas Trump, as soon as he got back into the White House at the end of January 2025, more or less declared, “Ukraine owes us money, the aid provided by the USA was a loan and I insist that Ukraine repay its debt in kind. So, to repay its debt, Ukraine must give us access to its natural resources.” He put it as bluntly as when he said he wanted to regain control of the Panama Canal and annexe Canada and Greenland.

It is important to note that Trump, in the eyes of international law, can absolutely not claim that donations made by the Biden administration to Ukraine were loans. One cannot decide after the event that a donation has become a loan. It is legally impossible. However, as we know, Trump doesn’t give a damn about international law. For this president, even more than for his predecessors, might is right, the law of the jungle prevails. He thinks nothing of declaring a barefaced lie, that donations were actually loans. Thus, according to Trump, Ukraine has contracted a debt to the United States. Trump wants to outdo Europe. He could see that the EU, which he considers to be a competitor, was going to get its hands on the natural resources he coveted, especially “rare earths”.

How does what Trump want compare to what the EU leaders want?

Trump wants to do the same thing as the European leaders, but in his own way. The Europeans want to create the impression that they respect international law, having granted loans and because Ukraine wants to join the EU. The Europeans have posed their conditions, amongst which is the requirement that Ukraine should open up its market to European investments. Any member country of the EU must open its borders to any company in the rest of the Union. This is its basic rule, one which we reject. We denounce this EU policy.

Trump, in his brutal way, with no respect for international law, says, “No, it is I, the President of the United States of America, who have the right to Ukraine’s natural resources. We sent them more weapons than the EU, we gave them more money than the EU and you, President Zelensky, as president of Ukraine, you absolutely need us to help you confront Putin. We, the United States, are on good speaking terms with Putin.” Trump said to Zelensky, “You must give up the eastern part of your country, let Putin have it. I can see that Putin has taken the Donbass (and Crimea). That is a fact.”

Trump reckons that if Putin agrees to let the United States have the rest of Ukraine’s natural resources, Washington can put pressure on Kiev to make Ukraine accept the loss of part of its territory. To attain this goal, he wanted Zelensky to agree and sign a bilateral agreement with the United States granting them access and ownership of Ukraine’s natural resources. According to Trump’s plan, Zelensky would recognize the annexation of Crimea, which took place in 2014, and the de facto annexation of the Donbass, and Putin would agree to the United States taking control of the natural resources in central and western Ukraine. These were the conditions for a cease-fire or, in the best-case scenario, a peace agreement. Under these conditions, Trump said, “I will guarantee the cease-fire and prevent Putin from attacking you. I will ensure that the agreement is respected.”

The European leaders claimed that they were angry at the United States’ attitude of no longer directly protecting Ukraine. They said they would get organised among themselves and strongly “re-arm” the EU, which already spends a great deal on arms. Western European countries were already highly militarised, but military spending had fallen off a little in the early 2000s until 2014. Contrary to the dominant narrative, the increase preceded the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Since 2022, there has been an extremely big increase, and this is only the beginning. [3] European leaders only criticise the fact that Trump is letting down Ukraine, and they complain about the tariffs that Trump wants to impose on a broad range of European products. What the Europeans are not saying, too embarrassing for them to acknowledge, is that they are annoyed that Trump wants to get hold of Ukrainian resources since they thought that they could do so themselves. Big German, French, Italian, Belgian and Dutch companies thought they would get access to the natural resources of the part of Ukraine that remains under the control of the constitutional Zelensky government. So the Europeans are annoyed but they cannot protest, since officially they cannot say they wanted the natural resources. The idea was to get hold of them gradually and without drawing attention. As they cannot admit to such an unethical objective, from the point of view of official EU policy, they are bound to say nothing.

Finally, an agreement was signed between the Ukrainian government and the Trump administration at the beginning of May [4]. As reported in The Guardian, “Most notably, [the agreement] excludes from its remit financial, military and humanitarian aid which had been previously sent to Ukraine, which Trump had repeatedly said he hoped to recoup. It also explicitly states that it should be implemented in a way that does not hamper Ukraine’s integration with the EU and that US companies will not have a monopoly on deals in Ukraine, but merely obtain the right to take part in competitive bids on fair terms.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/01/trump-administration-readies-first-sale-of-military-equipment-to-ukraine

According to The Conversation propagandising the agreement: “Ukraine will get access to US investment and technology, and the US will eventually get a share of the profits. The rest will finance the war-torn nation’s recovery if and when a peace agreement is signed with Russia. (…) Unlike in previous drafts, the country retains ownership of its natural resources. All profits are to be invested in Ukraine for ten years after the agreement comes into force” Source: https://theconversation.com/us-ukraine-minerals-deal-looks-better-for-kyiv-than-expected-but-trump-is-an-unpredictable-partner-255723

On paper, the agreement appears less unfavourable to Ukraine than Trump originally intended. As The Guardian says, there is no allusion made in the agreement to a debt owed by Ukraine to the United States. It is nevertheless clear that Trump and big private American companies will be wanting to make the most of Ukraine’s dependence on American “aid”. Although this is not part of the natural resources agreement, it also appears that Ukraine will now have to pay for arms supplied by Washington, whereas in Biden’s time they were supposedly given. This provision, if applied, will certainly upset the EU and Great Britain, who will wonder why they are giving arms to Ukraine for free while Washington is getting paid. The desire of Macron and other leaders to have their troops on Ukrainian territory is due to their desire to defend their imperialist interests of European companies and the governments that serve them, in the face of Washington and Moscow. The real interests of the Ukrainian people are not at all considered.

The position taken by Vitaliy Dudin, a member of Sotsialnyi Rukh (Social Movement) in Ukraine, is highly critical of the Kiev-Washington agreement, which was finally ratified by the Ukrainian parliament on 8 May 2025 without any real consultation of the population. Vitaly Dudin writes: “The minerals deal signed between Ukraine and the United States reflects US capital’s desire to gain unhindered access to Ukraine’s mineral resources. (…) US imperialism used Ukraine’s vulnerable position to impose a number of disadvantageous conditions. (…) The beneficiaries of the agreement are US capital and, perhaps, a section of the Ukrainian oligarchy, but not Ukrainian working people.” He adds, “The final terms of the Agreement were kept secret until the last moment, which made public discussion on this issue impossible. Negotiations and preparations were done in secret, and the position of the Ukrainian government was kept unknown. The voting process to ratify the Agreement also took place in an atmosphere of non-transparency and in the shortest possible time. The Ukrainian public still lacks full information about the annexes to the Agreement (the so-called Limited Partnership Agreement).”

But Sotsialny Rukh is not entirely beaten and says that an alternative is needed: “However, it would be wrong to describe this agreement as an irreversible national catastrophe. Ukraine may yet free itself from the colonial yoke and renounce the Agreement in the future, if it rids itself of oligarchic capitalism and reasserts its sovereignty.” It is very useful to read the whole of Vitaly Dudin’s analysis published on the CADTM’s site and other sites.

We must oppose all the different imperialisms at work in Ukraine

We are against Putin’s war on Ukraine and the occupation of part of its territory, we are against Trump’s policy towards Ukraine and we are against the EU’s policy towards Ukraine. These three great powers want, in one way or another, to plunder the country’s natural resources and exploit the Ukrainian people. We denounce this policy, we denounce the war and the invasion. We also criticise Zelensky because this is a neoliberal government that is prepared to privatise and pursue neoliberal policies.

As we are doing for the Palestinian people in the face of the Israeli occupation and the genocide that the Netanyahu government is perpetrating with the active support of Washington (and the active complicity of the European leaders), we must support the right of the Ukrainian people to resist the Russian invasion: it is an imperialist invasion causing immense loss of life and destruction. We support the right of the Ukrainian people to armed resistance against the Russian invasion. The Ukrainian people must also have the right to criticise Zelensky and to oppose Trump and the EU, which is obviously very complicated.

We are in favour of cancelling the debts claimed from Ukraine; we are in favour of creating a reconstruction fund managed under the control of the people of Ukraine and financed by the expropriation of the oligarchs and by taxes on the surplus profits of arms companies.

The major powers and the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo

Map of areas under the control of the M23 and its allies in Kivu. Legend: Armed Groups: Areas under the control of the M23 and its allies (Rwandan army) Presence of the Ugandan armed forces Presence of the Burundian armed forces Presence of armed militias allied with the government (Wazalendo) Areas controlled by the FARDC government Resources: Gold mines 3T mines (tin, tungsten, and tantalum)

Vertcarmin – Own work

Donald Trump’s administration is also manoeuvring to obtain greater access to the natural resources of eastern Congo. Trump says he is ready to put pressure on Rwanda and its president, Paul Kagame, to find a solution to the occupation of DRC territory by Rwanda and its ally, M23. The Rwandan government is directly involved in the plundering of the DRC’s natural resources by intervening in the east of the country, which shares a border with Rwanda. The first victims are civilians, particularly women. Over the last 30 years, the number of victims has risen to several million, and the rape of women is systematically used as a weapon of war, humiliation and terror. The major powers allow this to happen and their companies play an active part in the plundering and the despair of the people.

US companies are not as present in the region as they would like to be. Chinese, European and Canadian companies are more present. Trump wants to put pressure on Kagame on condition that Tshisekedi agrees to give American private companies far more access to the resources in eastern Congo. According to Reuters, relayed by other media, Trump’s chief negotiator for this is Erik Prince. He who founded the sinister private military company Blackwater, later renamed Academi, which was sold in 2010 following a succession of scandals (in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, etc.) and the conviction of several mercenaries employed by Blackwater, accused of illegally killing Iraqi civilians. Although convicted, they were pardoned by Trump during his first term in office. [5] Erik Prince has acted for the CIA on a regular basis and Blackwater and its successor companies have benefited from numerous contracts to support US armed operations. Erik Prince is a far-right libertarian in the same ideological vein as Javier Milei and Donald Trump.

So we can see that the competition for access to natural resources afflicts a region like eastern Congo just as it afflicts Ukraine and many other parts of the world; wherever there are natural resources considered vital by the major powers, the countries in question become the object of external intervention, manipulation, destabilisation and eventually war if necessary.

We condemn the intervention of Rwanda and the M23 in the Congo, the intervention of large foreign private companies that are destabilising the region and plundering its natural resources which could have benefited the population. We denounce Trump’s manœuvrers to obtain from Tshisekedi an agreement to gain greater access to the natural resources of eastern DRC. We also support all initiatives aimed at auditing and controlling Chinese, European, Canadian and other loans and investments in the region. The fact is that foreign companies are participating in the plundering of resources, fuelling insecurity and are arming independent and ill-controlled private militias.

The author thanks Jawad Moustakbal, Maxime Perriot, Claude Quemar and Christian Varin for their comments.

Translated by Vicki Briault Manus and Mike Krolikowski