The Trump administration will approve its first sale of military equipment to Ukraine since Donald Trump took office, in an indication that the mineral agreement signed by the two countries this week could open a way to weapons renewal shipments.
The State Department has certified a license proposed to export “$ 50 million or more” (37.6 million pounds sterling) of defense equipment and services in Ukraine, according to a communication sent to the American Committee for Foreign Relations. He would mark the first authorization of the genre since Trump took a break from any military aid linked to Ukraine shortly after taking office.
Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Thursday evening that the signing of the mineral agreement for a long time – in much better terms for Ukraine than what had been planned before – was the result of the meeting he held with Trump on the sidelines of the Pope’s funeral on Saturday.
“Now we have the first result of the Vatican meeting, which makes it really historic. We expect other results from the meeting,” he said in his night video address.
Zelenskyy praised the agreement as “really equal”, saying that he had created “a fairly important investment opportunity in Ukraine”.
A senior assistant said Kyiv hoped that arms deliveries resumed quickly. “There is no direct link where it is written that” you will receive these particular weapons “, but this opens the possibility of parallel talks on the purchase of weapons,” said Mykhailo Podolyak, an assistant in Zelenskyy, during an interview in Kyiv. “The American side is now open to these discussions,” he added.
The first Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine, Yulia Svyrydenko, signed the agreement on Washington on Wednesday, as well as the US Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent. Senior US officials told journalists that they expected to ratify the agreement in a week. The agreement will see a joint fund set up by the two countries, to be funded from new licenses to exploit deposits of critical minerals, oil and gas.
After several weeks, when Trump seemed gentle on Russia and severe to Ukraine, the authorities of kyiv hope that the dynamics could change. Zelenskyy said Thursday that the mineral agreement “changed significantly during the process” and that it was “a truly equal agreement that makes it possible to invest in Ukraine”.
More specifically, he excluded his money from a discount previously sent to Ukraine as a military and humanitarian aid, which Trump had said on several occasions that he hoped to recover. It also explicitly indicates that it should be implemented so as to hamper the integration of Ukraine with the EU and that American companies will not have a monopoly on the agreements in Ukraine, but will simply not get the right to participate in competitive offers on fair conditions.
The final document followed almost three months of back and forth negotiations, after the first plan was brought to Kyiv by Bessent and rejected by Zelenskyy also too punitive to sign. A subsequent signature ceremony was planned at the White House in February, but broke down after Trump and JD Vance turned against Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, which aroused a brutal conclusion of talks and the Ukrainian president invited to leave.
When he was asked how Kyiv was able to improve the terms of the mineral agreement, Podolyak said that real discussions took place in a very different tone to some of Trump’s public statements.
“It’s just the style of this (US) administration, it is very aggressive with communications. They will allow leaks to the most horrible conditions and so on, but in reality, they will normally negotiate and you can get a result,” he said. “They just use this attack to try to improve their starting position,” he added.
Podolyak said that because the American weapons provided should now be purchased, Kyiv should be more selective on what he has asked for the United States. “I think that fairly quickly, we will understand what types of weapons, to carefully select the unique weapons of the United States. Because if we can produce our own drones, for example, then we will do it here. But there are types of critical weapons that only the United States produces and no one else,” he said.
Zelenskyy previously expressed its interest in spending tens of billions of dollars to buy Patriot air defense systems in the United States, which suggests that this could be done either by the financing of European allies or through the planned mineral fund.
It was not immediately clear what weapons or services, the $ 50 million is now modest now on the table. The State Department is required to inform the Congress of Significant Sales of Armaments and Military Services under the Act on the Control of Arms Exports.
The authorization was requested for a direct commercial sale, which authorizes the transfer of “defense articles or defense services carried out under a license issued by the State Department by American industry directly to a foreign buyer”. The planned sale was reported for the first time by the Kyiv Post.
The latest aid package in Ukraine is noted from the Biden administration, when the congress authorized $ 1 billion in expenditure while the outgoing administration sought to accelerate military aid before Trump took office.
Russia’s reaction to the mineral agreement was attenuated, with the exception of former President Hawkish, Dmitry Medvedev, who said it was a disaster for Zelenskyy. “Trump has broken the kyiv regime to the point where they will have to pay for help in the United States with mineral resources,” he wrote on Telegram. “Now they (Ukrainians) will have to pay for military supplies with the national wealth of a missing country.”
