The United States and Ukraine on April 30 finally signed the minerals deal that was delayed by the now-infamous Oval Office exchange between the U.S. and Ukrainian presidents two months ago.

With China continuing to tighten its grip on critical minerals after the imposition of U.S. tariffs, control of so-called rare earths—essential for the production of many new technologies such as electric vehicles, wind turbines, and smartphones—is becoming ever more important.

Rare earth elements, a group of 17 essential elements, play a key role in powering modern technology, from electric vehicle motors to missile guidance systems.

Moreover, while some of these elements, such as dysprosium, samarium, and praseodymium, are called “rare,” they are not in fact rare in the Earth’s crust and can be found in many places.

China overtook the United States in the 1990s to become the largest rare earth element-producing and exporting country, and it was in that context that the Ukrainian president offered the United States access to what he claims are Europe’s largest reserves of the critical minerals titanium and uranium.

But there is one caveat. About 20 percent of Ukraine’s mineral resources, including about half its rare earth elements deposits, are in areas under Russian occupation.

And while titanium deposits have been identified in northwestern Ukraine, far from the fighting, Russia knows exactly where Ukraine’s critical resources are as a result of Soviet-era geological surveys.

The document said that six deposits contain tantalum, niobium, and beryllium, which are prized in the aerospace industry.

It also said that while lithium is not mined in Ukraine, the country’s lithium reserves account for about one-third of the proven reserves in Europe and approximately 3 percent of global deposits.

Jack Lifton, co-founder of Technology Metals Research, told The Epoch Times he is skeptical about Ukraine’s potential as a practical source of rare earth elements.

“So that’s the finished goods,” Lifton said.

He said water and access are required to build a mine, which is a difficult undertaking at the best of times, let alone in war-torn Ukraine.

“To dig a hole in the ground is very expensive,” Lifton said, noting that it costs around half a billion dollars to build a mine, on average.

“We have discoveries all over the place, but very few of them ever make it to the status of deposit,” Lifton said.

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He went further to say that, at best, the value of all the world’s rare earth production rounds to $15 billion a year. So even if Ukraine had gigantic deposits, they wouldn’t be that valuable in geo-economic terms.

“Say that Ukraine was able, as if by magic, to produce 20 percent of the world’s rare earths. That would equal about $3 billion annually. To reach the $500 billion mooted by Trump, the U.S. would need to secure 150-plus years of Ukrainian output,” Blas said.

“Some are stuck behind battle lines or, in the case of the geological record for one of the sites, require advanced processing technology and a stable energy grid to extract,” the report said. It said the valuation of the deposits is based on “decades-old data.”

“No sources contacted by Commodity Insights were aware of any commercial exploration or assessment of those deposits in the post-Soviet period.”

Morgan Bazilian, director of the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines, told S&P he was “not aware of any significant rare earth assets or reserves in Ukraine.”

“This is just another breathless fantasy that we will magically solve our critical mineral constraints through a country at war,” he said. “The closest analogy for me is the very similar hyperbole about the trillions of dollars of minerals sitting under Afghanistan.”

Lifton said that Mountain Pass also produces some 10 or 15 percent of “all of China’s needs.”

“Now here’s the way you solve the problem for the United States; you write a law,” he said.

“The export of rare earth minerals in the United States shall be prohibited by law, and Mountain Pass suddenly becomes an American asset, not a Chinese one.”

In 2023, Beijing banned the export of technology to make rare earth element magnets, adding them to an existing ban on technology to extract and separate the critical materials.

The Chinese Communist Party recently announced measures to tighten state control over the sector.

First, they need to be mined by digging vast open pits in the ground to obtain ore, which is then crushed and moved to undergo flotation, magnetic, or electrostatic processing.

The West can process rare earth elements, but China’s advanced processing technology limits what the West can do.

“Dysprosiun and terbium are today 100 percent produced by companies owned or controlled by China. We do not have access to them unless the Chinese sell them to us, and they are not doing that,” Lifton said.

“So the fact is, at this point in time, we cannot make the electric motors necessary for cars without Chinese imports,” he said.

But he said that the United States should look more to Brazil than Ukraine.

“There’s a dozen new companies in Brazil looking at recovering rare earths ionic clays, but none of them is in production,” he said.

“All the magnet earth can be produced in Brazil.”

China has partially shifted extraction activities to neighboring Burma (also known as Myanmar), where oversight is weaker, though the country is politically turbulent.

In 2024, the Kachin Independence Army, an armed group fighting the country’s ruling military, said it had taken control of a mining hub that is a major supplier of rare earth element oxides to China.

Some of the ways rare earth elements are extracted via open-pit mining and hydrometallurgical processing can produce toxic waste that pollutes the soil, water, and atmosphere.

In Bayan Obo, China, an industrial mining town and home to the world’s largest rare earth element mine, severe and bleak pollution from operations has affected the Yellow River and local communities.

In Malaysia, where it is mined, rare earth element activities produce nearly 500,000 tons of radioactive waste containing high thorium concentrations, which is a “significant burden” to the country, the investigation noted.