President Trump told his cabinet on Wednesday that President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine was expected to come to Washington to sign a framework agreement enabling the United States to share in the country’s mineral wealth, but he insisted the United States would not be providing security guarantees to Ukraine in return.
Obtaining such guarantees from Washington, the only nuclear-armed power truly capable of standing up to Russia, had been Mr. Zelensky’s central demand. His greatest concern is being forced into a cease-fire, only to discover Russia uses the time to rebuild its military, regroup and attempt again to seize his country again.
But Mr. Trump made clear that if there are to be any such promises, they will have to come from Europe, with little backup from Washington.
“I’m not going to provide security guarantees beyond very much,” he said at his first cabinet meeting, which was dominated by discussion of the firing of government workers and other efforts being overseen by Elon Musk, who has taken an outsized role in the administration. “We’re going to have Europe do that.”
Mr. Trump had not spoken publicly about what role, if any, the United States would play in deterring Russia from one day restarting the conflict. He stood in silence on Monday when Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, repeatedly brought up the topic of security guarantees at a joint news conference at the White House.
Mr. Trump’s flat statement that the United States would not be party to any security guarantees may accelerate an end to the fighting, but ultimately could embolden President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. The Russian leader is far more likely to agree to a cease-fire if he knows that the United States would not step in should he change his mind and attack again.
And Mr. Trump’s statement may cement Europe’s fear that he has essentially switched sides in the war, and is seeking a broader normalization of relations with Russia. The prospect that Europe may find itself in the position of supporting Ukraine and continuing to isolate Russia, while Mr. Trump takes the opposite position, has rattled NATO allies and led the incoming German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, to declare that Germany must seek “independence from the U.S.A.”
Mr. Trump’s Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has argued that the existence of an American financial interest in Ukraine’s reserves of titanium, lithium, uranium and rare earth minerals is the best security guarantee that the country could have.
“I call it an economic security guarantee,” Mr. Bessent said last weekend. He has been negotiating the minerals agreement with Mr. Zelensky and his aides.
Mr. Trump has cast the mineral agreement as compensation for what the United States has spent in Ukraine so far — an amount he has vastly inflated to $350 billion. In fact, the most generous estimates of what the United States has spent over the past three years is roughly half of that amount, even if one includes the cost of replenishing of American stockpiles — money that remains in the United States.
The idea of involving the United States in the monetization of Ukraine’s natural resources actually began with the Ukrainians, during the Biden administration. At the time the essence of the concept was the revenue from the mining would cover future military expenditures and the rebuilding of the most devastated parts of the country.
But under Mr. Trump, the negotiation took a very different turn, one more reminiscent of a colonial power demanding tribute.
Mr. Bessent was sent to Kyiv a little more than a week ago to get Mr. Zelensky to sign a deal that would have required the country to pay $500 billion to the United States. The Ukrainian leader refused, sparking a confrontation with the United States that included Mr. Trump calling him a “dictator,” while refusing to use the same word to describe Mr. Putin.
In the interest of keeping the uneasy relationship with Washington alive, however, Mr. Zelensky appears to have changed his objectives. His hope is to sign something on Friday in Washington that can be described as the mining deal Mr. Trump has demanded, but that would be more of a memorandum of understanding, with many of the details to be worked out later.
A draft of the document, obtained by The New York Times, contained only vague references to protecting Ukraine. It says the United States “supports Ukraine’s effort to obtain security guarantees needed to establish lasting peace.” During the cabinet meeting, Mr. Trump made clear what that means: The French and British can send what he termed “so-called peacekeepers” if they want, but he will have nothing to do with it.
European officials are far from agreeing to what such a force might look like. But the purpose and shape of the force could make a very big difference.
A peacekeeping force of the kind that Mr. Trump talked about might require 100,000 troops or more — a figure bigger than Britain, France and Germany could muster without pulling key forces from other missions, including those tied to defending NATO territory. An “observer” force could be much smaller — some officials say 10,000 troops or so — but it would, as the name implies, simply observe any violations, and report them.
An even smaller force could be a “tripwire” that would bring in a larger response to any military moves by the Russians, but that only works if the United States and its allies are prepared to respond.
Weak security agreements are familiar to the Ukrainians: In December 1994 they agreed to the “Budapest Memorandum,” in which they gave up their nuclear weapons — inherited from the old Soviet Union, and still controlled from Moscow — and the United States, Britain and Russia agreed “to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.”
The agreement proved worthless when Russia seized Crimea and went to war in the Donbas in 2014. And while the agreement brought the Ukrainians arms and intelligence support in 2022 at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, neither Britain nor the United States provided troops.