[Building a dig on Andriy Dovbenko, the founder of U.K.-Ukraine TechExchange who was found to be corrupt in Ukraine in 2019 and left Ukraine to settle in the UK in 2019 (coincidence?). He is involved with the UK contract to obtain rare earth minerals JUST PRIOR to Trump making the deal for rare earth in Ukraine. How many times can the rare earths in Ukraine be sold?]
Britain Wants Ukraine's Minerals Too
(Excerpt) Authored by Mark Curtis via Declassified UK Friday, Mar 14, 2025
When U.K. officials signed a 100-year partnership with Ukraine in mid-January, they claimed to be Ukraine’s “preferred partner” in developing the country’s “critical minerals strategy.”
Yet within a month, U.S. President Donald Trump had presented a proposal to Ukraine’s President Volodymr Zelensky to access the country’s vast mineral resources as “compensation” for U.S. support to Ukraine in the war against Russia.
Whitehall was none too pleased about Washington muscling in.
When Foreign Secretary David Lammy met Zelensky in Kyiv last month he reportedly raised the issue of minerals, “a sign that [Keir] Starmer’s government is still keen to get access to Ukraine’s riches”, the iPaper reported.
Lammy earlier said, in a speech last year:
“Look around the world. Countries are scrambling to secure critical minerals, just as great powers once raced to control oil.”
The U.K. foreign secretary was correct, but Britain itself is one of those powers, and Ukraine is one of the major countries U.K. officials — as well as the Trump administration — have their eyes on.
It’s no surprise why. Ukraine has around 20,000 mineral deposits covering 116 types of minerals such as beryllium, manganese, gallium, uranium, zirconium, rare earth metals and nickel.
The country, whose economy has been devastated by Russia’s brutal war, also possesses one of the world’s largest reserves of graphite, the largest titanium reserves in Europe, and a third of the continent’s lithium deposits.
These resources are key for industries such as military production, high tech, aerospace, and green energy.
In recent years, the Ukrainian government has sought to attract foreign investment to develop its critical mineral resources and signed strategic partnerships and held investment fora to showcase its mining opportunities.
The country has also begun auctioning exploration permits for minerals such as lithium, copper, cobalt and nickel, offering lucrative investment opportunities.
Media narratives largely parrot the U.K. government’s interests in Ukraine being about standing up to aggression. But Whitehall has in the past few years stepped up its interest in accessing the world’s critical minerals, not least in Ukraine.
Nusrat Ghani, a trade minister in Rishi Sunak’s government, held at least 10 meetings on the subject of critical minerals in 2023 and the first half of 2024, government transparency data shows.
Among the companies she met were giant U.K. mining corporations Rio Tinto and Anglo American, and arms exporter BAE Systems and military aerospace lobbyists, ADS.
It is not clear if Ukraine was the subject of these discussions but one other prominent firm Ghani met to discuss “mineral supply chains” was Rothschilds, which has extensive interests in Ukraine.
Ghani held a discussion with the Paris-headquartered global advisory firm in April 2023 while her successor Alan Mak did so the following year in May. Mak met the firm “to discuss Rothschild’s critical minerals work,” the data show.
The corporation was invited to the 2023 Ukraine Recovery Conference held in London and is a member of the U.K.-Ukraine Finance Partnership. It has also been the main adviser to the Ukrainian Ministry of Finance since 2017.
Rothschilds, on whose board sits former U.K. National Security Adviser Lord Mark Sedwill, has no less than $53 billion invested in Ukraine.
Writing recently in Unherd, researcher Sang-Haw Lee quotes a senior Labour figure saying the U.K. was involved in extensive negotiations for the whole of last year relating to securing exclusive access to Ukraine’s minerals, but that adequate government support was not forthcoming.
—
“As Ukraine’s ultimate European ally, the U.K. could leverage its strong position within NATO to help secure mining sites and transportation routes”, writes Andriy Dovbenko, the founder of U.K.-Ukraine TechExchange.
More:
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/britain-wants-ukraines-minerals-too