Donald Trump’s fight with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House reflected how the US treats Ukraine as a colony. Trump demands control of the country’s rare earths and critical minerals, to weaken China, re-industrialize, and build tech products. Trump wants to be paid $350 billion, roughly twice Ukraine’s GDP.

The fight that broke out in the White House between US President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, on February 28 was a stark symbol of the colonial relationship between the two countries.

“You’re in no position to dictate”, Trump yelled at Zelensky in the Oval Office. “You don’t have the cards right now. With us, you start having cards”.

The Trump administration has sought to impose an exploitative deal that will “make Ukraine a US economic colony”, in the words of the conservative British newspaper The Telegraph.

Trump is demanding control over Ukraine’s minerals, and plans to use revenue from the sale of its natural resources to pay the United States hundreds of billions of dollars, equivalent to roughly twice Ukraine’s GDP.

The US government believes that Ukraine could have trillions of dollars worth of rare earth elements and other critical minerals, which are needed for advanced technologies.

Trump wants to re-industrialize the United States, and he is offering corporations access to Ukraine’s resources to make their products.

This is part of Washington’s attempt to remove China from the supply chain for critical minerals, which has been a top priority of the Pentagon and the US House select committee on the Communist Party of China.

The Telegraph reported that Ukraine’s resources could be worth $15 trillion, writing that its “minerals offer a tantalising promise: the ability for the US to break its dependence on Chinese supplies of critical minerals that go into everything from wind turbines to iPhones and stealth fighter jets”.

Trump has stated that he wants to “un-unite” Russia and China, and his efforts to end the war in Ukraine also aim at splitting Moscow from Beijing.

Trump demands Ukraine pay the US twice its GDP
The US government pushed Ukraine into war with Russia, after expanding NATO up to Russia’s borders and backing a coup d’etat that overthrow Ukraine’s democratically elected, geopolitically neutral government in 2014. This set off a violent conflict that escalated into a massive proxy war between NATO and Russia in 2022.

Former US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stated clearly that Washington was using Ukraine to “weaken” Russia.

At different times, Trump has falsely claimed that the United States gave Ukraine $350 billion or $500 billion in aid. This is not true.

Independent analysts have calculated that the United States spent $119.7 billion on Ukraine-related “aid” since 2022.

According to the US Department of Defense, $182.8 billion was appropriated for military operations related to Ukraine from the end of 2021 to the end of 2024. The BBC noted that this figure includes military training in Europe and US weapons supplies.

Much of this “aid” consisted of US government contracts with private, for-profit weapons corporations, which produced the arms and ammunition that were sent to Ukraine.

In other words, the US military-industrial complex made a killing off of Ukraine “aid”.

Regardless, Trump is demanding that Ukraine pay the United States at least $350 billion, which is nearly two times the size of the country’s entire economy.

Ukraine’s GDP in 2024 was reported by the IMF to be $184.1 billion — although this figure is questionable, given the war.

The US wants Ukraine’s critical minerals
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally, has repeatedly said that the United States wants to exploit Ukraine’s critical minerals.

In a June 2024 interview on CBS, Graham stated:

What did Trump do to get the weapons flowing [to Ukraine during his first term]? He created a loan system.

They’re sitting on $10 to $12 trillion of critical minerals in Ukraine. They could be the richest country in all of Europe. I don’t want to give that money and those assets to Putin, to share with China.

If we help Ukraine now, they can become the best business partner we ever dreamed of. That $10 to $12 trillion of critical mineral assets could be used by Ukraine and the West, not given to Putin and China. This is a very big deal, how Ukraine ends.

In an interview on Fox News, just two weeks after Trump won the presidential election in November 2024, Graham argued that “the war is about money”, and he promised that Trump would impose a deal to “enrich ourselves with rare earth minerals”:

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