Why would Zelenskyy even contemplate a deal with the US with the current fascist administration?

• Zelenskyy has no reason to care about domestic politics in the US. It’s not his job to produce domestic change in the US.

• Any kind of arrangement that the US makes with Ukraine that aligns future US interests with Ukraine’s future is probably a good move from Ukraine’s standpoint, at least in the short term, for Ukraine. If there’s no Ukraine down the line, then there’s nothing the US gets. If you’re in the middle of an existential war, it is a good move to borrow money from other countries, since now they have a considerable interest in your future well-being.

• A lot of what Trump does is actually political theater for his domestic political base, with a lot of rather misleading bark and little bite. I find it very distasteful, but often what he’s doing is to take an action that sounds very substantial, and then amounts to rather little, like his claims during Term 1 that he would “tear up” NAFTA that mostly came down to renaming it and some small tweaks, or Term 2 having his (highly objectionable, threatened) global tariffs increasingly look like they’re turning into negotiating trade agreements. Trump has thrown around enormous dollar values that have little to do with the value of any kind of proven mineral reserves in Ukraine, and I’ve read a bit of expert commentary pointing out that it’s absolutely unclear where he’s gotten any kind of valuation that looks anything like the large numbers he’s mentioned. However, it’s a pretty good bet that his base has no idea what the value of anything in Ukraine is, so he can go back to them and say that he’s just made a huge financial gain for the US in Ukraine. If you’ve paid much attention to how he runs domestic politics, a lot of what he does involves making highly-misleading statements to people in the US who are not terribly-well-educated to gain their support for policies that often don’t wind up looking a whole lot like the impression that he’s giving them. I’m not going to excuse that. I find it abhorrently dishonest, personally. But it does rather suggest taking a rather large grain of salt on a lot of statements that Trump makes.

• Assuming that any such deal actually happens, and depending upon how this is structured, future administrations that are not Trump may have the option to just terminate any agreement and obligations. I’m very dubious that even the majority of the Republican Party is concerned about this, much less the Democrats.

• Ukraine could probably find various ways to terminate it as well, de jure or de facto — they’re a sovereign state, which creates a lot of room for pulling levers. For example, maybe they impose a tax on the mineral extraction industry that just happens to eat up all the profit it makes or something like that. What really matters, I think, is what expectations would be down the line — does the US actually expect some kind of payment? It’s not something that would come up for some time, not until after the war.

• From what limited attention I’ve been paying, I believe that part of the proposed arrangement involved the US committing capital. Depending upon the terms of that and any extraction, it could potentially amount to effectively transferring wealth from the US to Ukraine.

• What Trump was grousing about — and I have no idea if that’s his real concern or not — is that past US aid was in the form of a grant, whereas a large portion of the EU aid to Ukraine was a loan, where Ukraine needs to pay it back, and that it’s a poor arrangement for the US to be gifting and the EU just lending. Now, Trump’s also glossing over the fact that the EU loans are on reasonably-favorable terms. He’s not mentioning that last I checked, the EU was ahead in total aid. And he’s not mentioning that you could probably challenge the dollar value of some of the US (well, and EU) aid in military form, since some of the military hardware was designed to fight Soviet hardware and would probably have limited use elsewhere. But he does have a point. I wasn’t very enthusiastic about the EU offering loans rather than grants when that went through — I mean, Ukraine’s in a pretty tight place — but I wasn’t out calling the EU extortionate either.

  Not to mention, I’d add, that Ukraine isn’t planning on joining the US in any sense other than maybe the limited benefits of being in NATO; Ukraine would join the EU, not the US, so there’s a considerably more-limited US economic return. Ukraine would like to join the EU and the European Single Market, giving the European Single Market benefits in terms of scale and resource access, whereas the US wouldn’t see any sort of direct economic benefits from that, as there’s no US-EU free trade agreement.

  Now, I should make the very significant point that in World War II, US Lend-Lease aid was initially presented as being a loan to help assuage US voters upset about all this stuff being given away, then later essentially forgiven. The same happened with the Marshall Plan. I have wondered whether it’s possible that the EU intends basically a repeat of this political strategy, or at least to do no more than to use the loan as political leverage WRT the Ukrainian government down the line during EU accession or something like that. But Trump’s got a very real point, that the form of US and EU aid has not taken the same form. If you’re angry at Trump for asking for some level of repayment of that grant in some form, you should probably also maybe ask whether the EU should consider converting its aid to the form of a grant.

Now, I personally don’t think that Trump’s ask is justified, especially after the fact. I’ve got no interest in having us ask for some sort of mineral rights in Ukraine. But I think that there’s a fair bit of context to take into account.

If an agreement is signed and made public, then I’m sure that there will be legal and economic analysis and we can see what it actually amounts to. My own take is that I’d rather not have the US involved in it in the first place. But I think I’d see what’s actually in it before I got too upset.