I highly recommend Antonia Juhasz’s Rolling Stone cover story “Is Trump’s ‘Minerals Deal’ a Fossil Fuel Shakedown?” In a Facebook post, Juhasz notes that Ukrainian president Zelensky “is on his way to Saudi Arabia next week, being forced into a corner by the unholy alliance of Putin and Trump and to sign an ‘extortionist’ ‘neocolonial plundering’ of Ukraine’s vast natural resource riches, giving Trump and Putin unprecedented control of fossil fuels and minerals.”
The winners of the war, it turns out, are intended to be none other than Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Big Oil. Juhasz writes:
The deal would cut open Ukraine’s natural resource veins, and could leave the majority of its key resources — including fossil fuels — under Russian control. Fifty percent of Ukraine’s future earnings from its remaining natural resource wealth would go into a new fund under U.S. direction into which the United States would contribute nothing. The deal could benefit American and other Western companies but would provide few economic and no security guarantees to Ukraine.
It’s a steep price to pay for peace, but Ukraine may be forced to accept the deal given how closely aligned the Trump regime has become with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump is also laying the groundwork for the full reentry of Russia into the global economy, opening the door to a return of U.S. fossil fuel giants into one of the largest pools of oil and gas in the world.
The article is paywalled, but she urges us to share and read it, so I’ve done that with significant chunks of it here, in UKR-TAZ. That said, Rolling Stone has been publishing some excellent material recently (as I noted in my recent piece on critical media in the era of Trump 2.0), so they are worth following.