Treasury chief Bessent says President Trump handed Zelensky "a royal flush" with the US-Ukraine mineral deal which he can use in negotiations with Russia, signalling that there's "no daylight between the Ukrainian people, the American people, between our goals." There's just one problem, experts say: the entire deal looks like a propaganda stunt.
The Trump administration desperately needs a foreign policy victory amid the chaos and uncertainty surrounding it, hence its officials’ boasting about the minerals deal in “a typical case of speculative promotion,” veteran French geopolitical analyst Come Carpentier de Gourdon told Sputnik.
As for Zelensky, he can now claim the deal will ‘save Ukraine’, hoping “that Trump’s America will now be bound to support his regime militarily in exchange for a monopoly on the exploitation of some valuable Ukrainian natural resources.”