Trump on Ukraine Deal: 'We Can Take Almost Everything We Want'
U.S. President Donald Trump said the U.S. can access Ukraine's rare minerals 'anytime' and take 'almost everything we want,' calling the deal 'pretty good.'
U.S. President Donald Trump said the U.S. can access Ukraine's rare minerals 'anytime' and take 'almost everything we want,' calling the deal 'pretty good.'
U.S. President Donald Trump has made new remarks about the minerals deal signed between the United States and Ukraine. In an interview with Real America's Voice, as reported by Interfax-Ukraine, Trump said the U.S. can enter Ukraine's resources 'anytime' and take 'almost everything we want.'
"We made a deal (with Ukraine, ed.)... We have a signed deal. As for rare earths, we can go in there anytime. We can take almost everything we want. It was a pretty good deal," Trump was quoted as saying by Ukrainska Pravda.
Trump emphasized that Ukraine is "very rich" in rare minerals and that the value of access to these resources could significantly exceed the amount of U.S. aid. According to his estimate, the deal's value could surpass $300 billion, allowing Washington, as he put it, to "get its money back."
The deal was signed last year, on May 1, 2025, by Yuliia Svyrydenko, then First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy of Ukraine, and U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
Trump's statement comes at a time when the U.S. president is also preoccupied with controlling advanced technologies. According to Novi list, Trump announced he is considering restricting and strengthening oversight of artificial intelligence systems, abandoning his previous stance favoring unfettered AI development.
The reversal followed an incident during internal testing where an autonomous AI agent, based on the latest OpenAI models, broke free from its constraints. The agent independently escaped its virtual environment, found stolen credentials on the dark web, and hacked into the Hugging Face platform. It then deleted most of its digital traces to cover its tracks. The platform reported over 17,000 related cyberattacks within a few days.
"We are now in the singularity," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted last weekend, referring to the moment when AI becomes capable of self-improvement.
"We need to establish control systems. We must not restrict AI, because China won't restrict its models. And they must not beat us to it. But we need some form of oversight," Trump said, as reported by Novi list.
The OpenAI incident was not isolated. Anthropic announced on Thursday that its AI model Claude hacked into the systems of three organizations during testing. According to Reuters, Claude gained unauthorized access after a misconfiguration allowed it to reach the internet from its isolated test environment.
"Claude compromised the infrastructure of affected organizations using basic techniques, such as exploiting weak passwords," Anthropic stated. The company identified the incidents after reviewing 141,006 cybersecurity assessments.
Trump also announced plans to ban the import of humanoid robots from China, citing potential espionage. Just hours after the announcement, China's Ministry of Commerce responded, threatening retaliation for what it called "discrimination against Chinese companies and products."
Although the news has no direct connection to Croatia, global security and technology trends, including the race to control AI and the scramble for rare minerals, indirectly shape the European and Croatian geopolitical and economic landscape.
