US President Donald Trump has said he wants access to Ukraine’s mineral deposits in exchange for future military aid that Kyiv needs as it continues to defend itself against Russia’s aggression.

While the comment highlighted Trump’s transactional approach to the war in Ukraine, it was not entirely unexpected. The US and other Western countries have eyed Ukraine’s mineral riches for a long time.

“We’re putting in hundreds of billions of dollars. They have great rare earths. And I want security of the rare earth, and they’re willing to do (that),” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, without specifying what, if anything, Ukraine had agreed to do.

He has previously suggested that any future assistance should be provided as a loan and would be conditioned on Ukraine negotiating with Russia.

Under former US President Joe Biden, the US had provided Ukraine with $65.9 billion in military assistance since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of the country in February 2022.

Biden argued the aid was necessary because Ukraine’s victory was key to America’s own security. Trump, however, has made it clear he doesn’t believe the US should continue providing assistance without getting something in return.

While Trump did not give any details on what he wants from Kyiv, a deal outlining a deeper cooperation between the US and Ukraine on minerals had been in the works for months before he took office in January.

A memorandum of understanding prepared under the Biden administration last year said the US would to promote investment opportunities in Ukraine’s mining projects to American companies in exchange for Kyiv creating economic incentives an implementing good business and environmental practices.

Ukraine already has a similar agreement with the European Union, signed in 2021.

Adam Mycyk, a partner in the Kyiv office of the global law firm Dentons, said that while the objective of the deal – securing critical mineral supplies from Ukraine – remains unchanged, Trump’s approach seems to be more transactional.

Kyiv has not yet responded to Trump’s comments, but the Ukrainian government has in the past made the argument that its mineral deposits are one of the reasons the West should support Ukraine – to prevent these strategically important resources from falling into Russian hands.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has specifically mentioned the possibility of future investments in the country’s natural resources by its Western allies as a key part of his “Victory plan.”

“The deposits of critical resources in Ukraine, along with Ukraine’s globally important energy and food production potential, are among the key predatory objectives of the Russian Federation in this war. And this is our opportunity for growth,” Zelensky said in a statement outlining the plan in October.

Nataliya Katser-Buchkovska, the co-founder of the Ukrainian Sustainable Investment Fund, said a deal that would bring US investment into Ukraine’s mining sector would be beneficial for both sides.

The US largely depends on imports for the minerals it needs, many of which come from China. Of the 50 minerals classed as critical, the US was entirely dependent on imports of 12 and more than 50% dependent on imports of a further 16, according to the United States Geological Survey, a government agency.

Ukraine, meanwhile, has deposits of 22 of these 50 critical materials, according to the Ukrainian government.

“It is not only a crucial step for Ukraine’s post-war economic recovery, but it’s also a chance for the US to address global supply chain issues,” said Katser-Buchkovska, who served as a member of the Ukrainian Parliament from 2014 to 2019 and was the head of a parliamentary committee on energy security and transition.

China’s global dominance

Although Trump used the term “rare earths,” it is unclear whether he intended to refer specifically to rare earth minerals – a group of 17 elements that exist in the earth’s core and have magnetic and conductive properties that make them crucial to the production of electronics, clean energy technologies and some weapon systems.

Ukraine doesn’t have globally significant reserves of rare earth minerals, but it does have some of the world’s largest deposits of graphite, lithium, titanium, beryllium and uranium, all of which are classed by the US as critical minerals. Some of these reserves are in areas that are currently under Russian occupation.

China has long dominated the global production of rare earths minerals and other strategically important materials. It is responsible for nearly 90% of global processing of rare earth minerals, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). On top of that, China is also the world’s largest producer of graphite and titanium, and a major processor of lithium.

The latest trade spat between Washington and Beijing makes it even more important for the US to look for alternative suppliers.

The economic measures China announced on Tuesday in retaliation for Trump’s new tariffs include new export controls on more than two dozen metal products and related technologies. While they do not cover the most critical materials the US needs, the move indicates that China is prepared to use its mineral riches as leverage in trade disputes.

Mycyk said that the demand for these critical materials is expected to surge because of the global transition to electric vehicles and renewable energy technologies.

“Ukraine’s deposits are thus globally significant, offering diversification away from dominant producers like China. Keeping these resources under Ukrainian control is crucial for maintaining its economic sovereignty,” he added.

Food distribution is being stopped. Health services are being shut down. Lifesaving aid is being tied up, with no way to disburse it.

These aren’t warnings of what’s to come, but examples of what aid workers say is the fallout of the Trump administration’s freeze on foreign aid and the gutting of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

“It’s heartbreaking for our beneficiaries, for whom this is life and death,” a USAID worker said.

“We have programs in Ukraine, we have programs in Burma, in Sudan, in some of the most complicated, dangerous places in the world, where there are just massive humanitarian needs,” the USAID employee said. “All of that is stopped. All of that is paused.”

“We do work that we think is really important for America’s power and stability abroad. We don’t do this work because it’s nice. We do it because it buys us much more, and it gives us much more than we are giving,” the USAID employee added. “It’s devastating to see this on a personal level, and I just think it’s so foolhardy on a global level.”

Meanwhile, thousands of Americans and people abroad are losing their jobs, as the entire aid industry reels from unpaid contracts.

These are a small selection of countries and programs severely affected by the aid freeze.

Without safe water, ‘people die, people are displaced’

USAID supports hundreds of projects focused on water security, in Jordan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, India, and dozens of other nations. An estimated 4 billion people globally don’t have access to safe drinking water.

Without those programs, “animals die, people die, people are displaced,” said Evan Thomas, a professor of environmental engineering at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

He works on a project in Kenya that helps more than 1 million people access clean water, via 200 deep groundwater pumps installed and partially funded by USAID. Now, the program is unable to pay contracts with people hired to help maintain and repair the pumps.

“That entire program is now at risk of falling apart,” he said.

“When people don’t have water, when their livestock die, they become very stressed, and there are militias that are willing to take advantage of that stress and recruit for their own aims,” said Thomas, citing concerns about the rising influence of terror group Al-Shabaab in Kenya. “Undermining the access of people around the world to food and water and medicine is not going to make America more secure.”

“People don’t just sit around and die of thirst. They move. They migrate. And so this will create increased migration pressure everywhere in the world,” Thomas added.

Elsewhere in Kenya, other USAID-funded projects help improve care for HIV/AIDS patients are also being disrupted.

‘Feeding programs in Sudan are being shut down’

In Sudan, food kitchens funded by US aid are already shutting down, according to Jeremy Konyndyk, the president of Refugees International and a former USAID official.

It comes as the UN reports millions of families, many displaced, are experiencing crisis levels of hunger amid the country’s ongoing conflict.

“A lot of displaced people and a lot of people who are caught in famine and other crises could be harmed, if not gravely harmed, if not killed by this pullback of aid,” said Konyndyk, warning of the wide-reaching impact on refugees in Sudan, Syria and Gaza.

The US system for monitoring global famine, FEWSNET, which is used throughout the world, has also been shut down amid the Trump administration’s aid freeze.

“USAID has been a cornerstone of lifesaving initiatives in famine-stricken regions such as Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan, but the funding freeze leaves millions without access to essential services like health care, clean water, and shelter,” according to the executive director of the International Council of Voluntary Agencies, Jamie Munn.

Malaria cases will be ‘increasingly common occurrence’ in US without overseas projects

USAID spearheads a program to control and eliminate malaria in 24 of the hardest-hit African nations, including Mali, where malaria is the leading cause of mortality.

The aid agency funds and delivers antimalarial medications, test-kits and insecticide-treated bug nets, which save lives and help reduce the number of mosquitos.

Malaria still kills about 600,000 people each year worldwide – most of them children under the age of five. But in the countries where the USAID-run President’s Malaria Initiative operates, the mortality rate has been cut in half since George W. Bush launched it in 2006.

“One of the reasons that we don’t have malaria in the US is because we fund and track malaria worldwide, for global health security,” the contractor said. “So, the cases that everyone saw in Florida this past year would become an increasingly common occurrence if we’re not funding driving down the parasite elsewhere.”

Afghanistan ‘faces severe repercussions’ for vulnerable women

Afghanistan “faces severe repercussions as the funding pause disrupts education programmes, healthcare delivery, and women’s empowerment initiatives, undermining long-term recovery and stability,” the International Council of Voluntary Agencies said in a statement.

Meanwhile, more than 6 million people in the country are surviving on “just bread and tea,” World Food Program (WFP) Country Director for Afghanistan Hsiao-Wei Lee told Reuters.

She is concerned about the aid freeze given that the WFP is already running on half the funding it needs in Afghanistan.

The WFP received 54% of its funding last year from the US, according to the UN.

Funding disrupted for Ukrainian schools and heating systems

USAID funds backup heating systems to schools and hospitals in 14 regions of Ukraine, which are invaluable amid Russia’s continued attacks on the country’s energy infrastructure, according to the USAID Ukraine account on ‘X.’ That account has since been taken offline.

USAID also assists with equipment delivery to energy workers, for example in the southern city of Odesa, which was recently hit in one of Russia’s assaults on Ukraine’s energy supplies.

Funding for these programs, as well as others focused on food security and veterans’ rehabilitation has been frozen, according to nonprofits in the country.

Lawmakers in the Ukrainian parliament have made a plea for continued USAID assistance, which also funds programs that enable thousands of children to continue their education and support children impacted psychologically by the war.

USAID funding further supports Ukrainian media outlets, in an effort to keep them going amid economic hardship and counter Russian media and propaganda.

“The grants have become a pillar of support for many domestic media outlets, as the advertising market, which helped the media survive, has not yet revived after the full-scale invasion of the Russian Federation,” the Ukrainian Parliament’s Committee on Humanitarian and Information Policy said last week.

It’s ‘going to destabilize the Venezuelan and Colombian border’

In Colombia, USAID funds and operates programs related to counter-narcotics, emergency food assistance, combatting deforestation and more.

Donors and organizations working on the ground have expressed huge concerns about the sudden drop off in aid, especially as the country faces an escalation in violence and a humanitarian crisis in the Catatumbo region, a strategic territory for drug production.

“We’ve tried to explain that (the aid freeze) is both going to destabilize the Venezuelan and Colombian border, but also destabilize the internal conflict, and that is one of the largest coca-growing areas in the country,” said one aid worker, highlighting concerns about an uptick in drug trafficking as well as local people suffering.

Non-governmental aid workers in the Latin America region have compiled a list of current USAID projects they say are designed to counter immigration and combat the influence of cartels, with that work now halted in Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

US funds 47% of global humanitarian aid

The impacts are far wider than a handful of countries, of course, with international nonprofits warning about consequences on every continent.

“I think the entire humanitarian system could collapse because we fund about 40% of it,” the USAID official added. According to UN officials, the US funds around 47% of global humanitarian aid.

The country is the largest provider of humanitarian assistance globally, although it accounts for less than 1% of the federal budget.

Speaking to the press in El Salvador on Monday, Rubio said the “functions of USAID” must align with US foreign policy and that it is “a completely unresponsive agency.”

When asked about the arguments that USAID’s work is vital to national security and promoting US interests, Rubio said, “There are things that USAID, that we do through USAID, that we should continue to do, and we will continue to do.”

Since it was established by Congress in 1961, USAID “has brought lifesaving medicines, food, clean water, assistance for farmers, kept women and girls safe, promoted peace, and so much more over decades, all for less than one percent of our federal budget,” Oxfam America President Abby Maxman said in a statement. “Ending USAID as we know it would undo hard-earned gains in the fight against poverty and humanitarian crisis, and cause long-term, irreparable harm.”

The Taliban suspended the operation of Afghanistan’s only women’s radio station after raiding its premises on Tuesday, deepening the exclusion of women from public life and society since the group took power in 2021.

Kabul-based Radio Begum – a station run by women with content aimed at women’s education – said officers from the Taliban’s information and culture ministry restrained the station’s staff as it searched its premises in the nation’s capital.

Officers “seized computers, hard drives, files and phones from Begum staff, including Begum female journalists, and took into custody two male employees of the organization who do not hold any senior management position,” the station said in a statement on Tuesday.

The ministry later confirmed the station’s suspension, citing several alleged violations of “broadcasting policy and improper use of the station’s license,” including “the unauthorized provision of content and programming to a foreign-based television channel.”

It did not identify the foreign TV channel in question, but said it will determine the station’s future “in due course.”

Reporters Without Borders (RSF), an independent rights group, condemned the suspension and demanded its immediate reversal.

Before Tuesday’s ban, Radio Begum broadcast six hours of lessons a day, along with health, psychology and spiritual programs to women across most of Afghanistan. The station said it provides education to Afghan girls and support to Afghan women, without being “involved in any political activity whatsoever.”

Its sister channels also offer lessons online filmed in studios thousands of miles away in Paris. The televised classes cover a wider array of subjects, providing education in a country where girls are banned from school after sixth grade.

Tightening the grip

The Taliban, a radical Islamist group not recognized by most countries around the world, has been tightening its grip on the media landscape since its takeover more than three years ago.

Initially presenting itself as more moderate than during its previous rule of Afghanistan in the 1990s, it even promised that women would be allowed to continue their education up to university.

But it has since cracked down instead, closing secondary schools for girls; banning women from attending university, working in most sectors and at NGOs, including the United Nations; restricting their travel without a male chaperone; and banning them from public spaces such as parks and gyms.

Last year, the Taliban closed at least 12 media outlets, both public and private, according to RSF, which ranked Afghanistan 178 out of 180 countries in its latest press freedom index.

The Islamist regime also banned the sound of women’s voices in public – including singing, reciting, or reading aloud – under a strict set of “vice and virtue” laws that made it even harder for Radio Begum to reach its female audience.