This will be lost in the conversation. But I actually decided to do some poking around regarding mineral resource concentrations in Ukraine.
https://pubs.usgs.gov/myb/vol3/2020-...21-ukraine.pdf
https://www.geo.gov.ua/en/
https://www.spglobal.com/market-inte...iable-87318842
This "mineral deal" is retarded horseshit.
Ukraine does not actually have any substantial commercially viable "rare earth" or whatever fucking dumb thing deposits, according to the Ukrainian geological survey itself.
There is a wide spattering of valuable and accessible mineral deposits, just like you'd find in pretty much any country the size of Ukraine, but it's nothing extraordinary or special.
There's a huge difference between having a mineral deposit and whether those mineral deposits are commercially viable for extraction or not. Most of the Ukrainian stuff, is just not viable. The way the Trump administration talks about these mineral deposits is in the terms of the raw value of the mineral after extraction. Yeah sure Ukraine is sitting on 875462985762 billion dollars of lithium, but almost none of it exists in commercially viable forms for extraction.
Here's the extra kicker tho. According to the Ukrainian geological survey, their own survey data is "corrupted" as it's based mostly on unreliable Soviet era surveys which were often bloated and manipulated or used unreliable and outdated survey methods. With other words, the Ukrainian professionals are skeptical about their own geological survey maps.
What I'm fucking annoyed by tho, is that the our media absolutely fails to call this out.
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Check the above.