All posts tagged "Rare Minerals"

Volodymyr Zelenskyy is meeting with Donald Trump at the White House Friday where the U.S. president is expected to claim victory for a rare minerals deal that will serve as "payback" for U.S. assistance to the war-torn nation. Trump has long sought to be reimbursed for providing Ukraine with weapons needed to push back the Russians, even thought the heads of state for Great Britain and France tried to explain this week that that's not how it's done.

In the Oval Office Thursday Trump asserted that European nations will "get their money back" from what they put into Ukraine's war effort, but Prime Minister Keir Starmer insisted that wasn't true: "Quite a bit of ours was gifted. It was given," Starmer said.

Earlier in the week, French President Emanuel Macron also corrected Trump's claims of payback: "To be frank," Macron said, "we paid 60% of the total effort...through guaranteed grants."...

In trying to make sense of President Donald Trump's favor of Russia over Ukraine, New York Times opinion columnist Thomas L. Friedman floated two possibilities.

Friedman called his introspection, "one of the most disturbing questions I've ever had to ask about my own country."

Option one: "Are we being led by a dupe for Vladimir Putin — by someone ready to swallow whole the Russian president’s warped view of who started the war in Ukraine and how it must end?"...