President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is expected to travel to the White House Friday — a week after President Donald Trump called him a "dictator" — to sign a deal that would afford America access to some of Ukraine's buried natural wealth in exchange for investments in a reconstruction fund.
Trump noted Wednesday that it would be "a very big agreement."
While there was no mention in a draft of the deal of Ukraine paying the U.S. back for the hundreds of billions of dollars in aid that Kyiv has received in recent years, there are similarly no concrete security guarantees on America's part.
According to a draft of the deal obtained by CNN, the two countries plan to create a jointly managed "Reconstruction Investment Fund" that would collect and reinvest revenues resulting from the monetization of relevant Ukrainian-owned "deposits of minerals, hydrocarbons, oil, natural gas, and other extractable minerals."