Open letter to the Financial Times regarding the US-Ukraine minerals deal
- Matthew Parish
- Apr 5
- 2 min read
Ukraine Development Trust
Krakivska Street 26
79000 Lviv
Ukraine
Roula Khalaf
Editor
The Financial Times
Bracken House
1 Friday Street
London EC4M 1BT
BY EMAIL: letters.editor@ft.com
Dear Madam,
Your article entitled Kyiv probes leak of US minerals deal with polygraph tests, dated 5 April 2025
Your article entitled “Kyiv probes leak of US minerals deal with polygraph tests”, dated 5 April 2025, creates a fundamental misconception about what the second US-proposed minerals deal between the US and Ukraine is.
Your article appears here, albeit behind a paywall:
Contrary to common misconceptions, the agreement does not take away any of Ukraine’s sovereignty and it does not block Ukraine’s EU accession process. There is a lot of misinformation in Kyiv about the US-Ukraine negotiations but as an international lawyer and the Editor-in-Chief of the Lviv Herald, www.lvivherald.com, I wrote an article discussing what the latest draft of the minerals deal is about, and I published a copy of it My article appears here (no paywall involved):
As you will see, the second draft prepared by the United States is just a standard form investment agreement between a government investment co-financing investment corporation (in this case the Development Financing Corporation, or DFC, a US federal government agency) and a series of Delaware special purpose vehicles the purpose of which has yet to be determined. It is an extremely early draft, and the drama about it is quite unwarranted. As to the observation that President Zelenskyy has ordered polygraph tests to establish who leaked it, I do not know whether that is true but it sounds unlikely given that the identity of the leaker is available on Deutsche Welt's Ukrainian language Telegram channel.
Yours faithfully,
Matthew Parish
Executive Chairman
Ukraine Development Trust
Lviv, Ukraine