Trump claims Ukraine will pay for assistance with $500 billion in rare earths

"They have tremendously valuable land in terms of rare earth [minerals], in terms of oil and gas, in terms of other things. I want to have our money secured, because we’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars [in Ukraine]," Trump told Fox News.

During the interview, Trump insisted that the US should have access to Ukraine's natural resources regardless of whether a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine is successful, arguing that the "more than $300 billion" the US has given Ukraine dwarfs the contributions of other countries to the war effort.

"They may make a deal. They may not make a deal. They may be Russian someday, or they may not be Russian someday. But we’re going to have all this money in [Ukraine] and I say, I want it back," the US president said.

Trump said it would be “stupid” to continue providing aid to war-torn Ukraine. “I said to them, ‘We have to – We have to get something. We can’t continue to pay this money,’” he said.

“I told them that I want the equivalent of like $500 billion worth of rare earth [minerals], and they’ve essentially agreed to do that,” Trump said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has expressed support for a reciprocal resource deal with the United States in exchange for security guarantees as part of a potential peace settlement.

“If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskyy told Reuters. “.We need to stop Putin and protect what we have — a very rich Dnipro region [in] central Ukraine”

Ukraine is home to about 5% of the world's mineral resources, with rich deposits of titanium, uranium, iron, manganese, and lithium, as well as rare earth metals, which are considered vital to US national security.