KYIV/WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Ukraine and the U.S. could sign the minerals and economic cooperation deal they’ve been negotiating as soon as next week, President Donald Trump said on Thursday.
“We have a minerals deal, which I guess is going to be signed on Thursday,” Trump told reporters at the White House, in an apparent reference to the U.S.-Ukraine deal.
Trump has pushed for a compact that would allow the United States to have privileged access to Ukraine’s natural resources and critical minerals in what he casts as repayment for military aid provided by Washington to Ukraine under the previous presidency of Joe Biden.
The Ukrainian delegation traveled to Washington at the end of last week for negotiations after the Trump administration offered a new, more expansive deal. The initial framework agreement that was agreed to has never been signed.
Sitting alongside Trump in the Oval Office on Thursday, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said “we’re still working on the details” and that the signing could come by next Friday.
“It’s substantially what we’d agreed on previously,” he said. “When the president was here, we had a memorandum of understanding. We went straight to the big deal, and I think it’s an 80-page agreement and that’s what we’ll be signing.”
The White House did not respond to a request for further details on the timing and contents of the agreement.
Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskiy had said earlier that the two countries could sign a memorandum of intent online on Thursday.
“This is a memorandum of intent. And we have positive, constructive intentions,” Zelenskiy told reporters in Kyiv.
He added that the offer to sign the memorandum before the comprehensive deal, which would require ratification in the Ukrainian parliament, had come from the U.S. side.
Ukraine’s economy minister has said Kyiv and Washington made significant progress while discussing the agreement, and the memorandum is the first stage to record this.
(Reporting by Yuliia Dysa in Kyiv, Angelo Amante and Trevor Hunnicutt in Washington; editing by Mark Heinrich and Anna Driver)
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