The U.S.-Ukraine minerals agreement isn’t a rescue. It’s a foreclosure. A country dismembered by war, sold piecemeal to monopoly capital, with its working class trapped between comprador betrayal and imperial partition.
Written By: Prince Kapone | Weaponized Information | May 1, 2025
The Empire’s Paper of Record Sells a Colonial Looting as “Reconstruction”
On May 1, 2025, The New York Times ran a headline declaring: “Trump Strikes Mineral Deal With Ukraine to Secure Critical Supply Chains.” Penned by longtime correspondent Andrew Kramer, the article presented the deal as a victory for Ukraine’s postwar recovery: a partnership to rebuild its economy, secure vital minerals for the West, and stabilize a war-torn country.
But behind the headline lies a familiar imperial script. Kramer, a loyal mouthpiece of the imperial narrative machine, has spent years framing Ukraine’s war as a fight for democracy, Russia as an unprovoked aggressor, and NATO as a guarantor of peace. His reporting during the Maidan coup sanitized fascist paramilitaries, demonized Donbass resistance fighters as “terrorists,” and never once questioned U.S. or EU motives. In this latest dispatch, he continues that legacy: laundering an imperial plunder operation as a technocratic breakthrough.
The article frames the agreement as a win-win. Ukraine gets reconstruction investment; the U.S. secures critical minerals like lithium, titanium, and rare earths. Kramer calls it a step toward “economic stability.” But what’s missing from his narrative speaks louder: no mention of the Maidan coup that installed Ukraine’s comprador-fascist regime. No mention of the 10-year sabotage of the Minsk accords. No mention of NATO’s militarization of Ukraine. No mention of the BlackRock and JPMorgan vultures Zelensky personally invited to carve up Ukraine’s land, labor, and industries under the banner of “reconstruction.”
The article makes no room for the truth: Ukraine isn’t being rebuilt. It’s being liquidated. Its minerals deal isn’t a partnership. It’s a foreclosure sale under imperial duress, signed by a comprador regime whose loyalty lies not with the Ukrainian working class, but with the monopoly finance capital controlling its fate.
A Country Dismembered: The Minerals Deal as Imperial Partition
To understand this deal, we must situate it within the broader imperial recalibration under the Trump 2.0 regime. Trump’s rapprochement with Russia—his public gestures of “friendship,” his softening rhetoric, his hints at ending the war—is not a break from imperialism. It’s a recalibration: a tactical attempt to peel Russia away from China, fracture the multipolar bloc, and secure imperial monopoly over Europe’s resources while freezing territorial lines on Russia’s current gains.
The U.S. no longer needs Ukraine to retake Donbass or Crimea. The price of peace, under this imperial bargain, is tacitly accepting Russian control over eastern territories while locking western and central Ukraine into economic dependency under monopoly finance capital. The minerals deal formalizes that dependency: transforming Ukraine’s remaining land and resources into collateral for U.S. geopolitical leverage, even as its eastern regions remain under Russian control.
But let’s be clear: this partition isn’t merely an imperial imposition. It’s also a reflection of the Ukrainian working class’s uneven terrain of struggle. In Donetsk and Lugansk, the working class didn’t wait for Moscow to decide its fate. It fought. It resisted fascist repression. It voted for independence. It aligned with Russia not because of Russian imperialism, but because Ukraine’s comprador-fascist regime bombed their homes, banned their language, outlawed their parties, and unleashed neo-Nazi paramilitaries to ethnically cleanse them.
In Donbass, sovereignty wasn’t surrendered. It was asserted under siege. The empire calls it annexation. We recognize it as survival under fascist comprador terror.
Meanwhile, in western and central Ukraine, the working class faces a different chain: debt bondage, IMF austerity, NATO militarization, and monopoly finance capital’s takeover of land, minerals, and industries. Zelensky’s public invitations to BlackRock, JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs weren’t diplomatic missteps. They were the explicit strategy of a comprador elite selling Ukraine to empire piece by piece.
The minerals deal is thus not just an economic transaction. It’s the economic annexation of Ukraine’s western half, complementing the territorial severance of the east. It is imperial partition by military, political, and economic means—a country dismembered by war, looted by monopoly capital, and disciplined by imperial duress.
Not a Rescue, But a Robbery: Ukraine’s Working Class Trapped Between Betrayal and Plunder
Kramer’s article paints the deal as a pragmatic solution. But from the vantage of the oppressed, it is nothing less than a neocolonial robbery. Every clause in the agreement ties Ukraine’s resource wealth to a U.S.-controlled fund. Every promise of future profits is structured to flow back to Western creditors. Every “investment” is designed to cement dependency, not liberation.
And the working class? In the west and center, trapped in IMF debt peonage, forced to rebuild a country for foreign capitalists, stripped of their natural patrimony. In the east, still under blockade and siege, still recovering from years of bombardment, still demonized by the comprador-fascist state they rejected a decade ago.
There is no “national sovereignty” in this minerals deal. There is no “win-win.” There is only imperial monopoly capital tightening its grip on Ukraine’s body, even as its limbs are amputated under the maproom knives of imperial recalibration.
Organizing Beyond Analysis: Material Solidarity Against NATO and Empire
We at Weaponized Information expose these crimes not as spectators, but as revolutionary militants. And exposure is not enough. We must mobilize. We must materially intervene.
Across the imperial core, anti-imperialist forces have already been organizing against NATO and U.S. imperial aggression. We salute CODEPINK for its anti-NATO campaigns. We honor the Black Alliance for Peace for its leadership connecting NATO’s wars abroad with repression at home. We uplift the Uhuru Movement, facing FBI raids for daring to solidarize with Russia against imperialism. We recognize all revolutionary forces standing against the empire’s propaganda, militarism, and monopoly plunder.
We call on comrades to not only amplify these efforts—but to build them in your workplaces, unions, schools, neighborhoods. Disrupt weapons shipments. Expose military recruiters. Protest NATO bases. Sabotage the empire’s logistical nodes. Refuse the empire’s war machine every foothold it claims.
And to comrades in Donbass, in Russia, in occupied territories: know that your struggle is seen. Your defiance against fascist comprador rule is not forgotten. The same empire that loots your minerals loots ours. The same NATO guns pointed at you are aimed at the Global South. We fight the same system. We dream the same freedom.
The minerals they steal, the borders they harden, the debts they impose, the regimes they install—none are permanent. Empire’s walls are cracking. And when the day comes, comrades, we will tear down every extractive chain, every comprador contract, every monopoly corridor they built on our backs.
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