Ukraine’s material success has been a crucial factor in its negotiations with the US as the two nations work out information for a peace deal in Ukraine’s war with Russia.
After a rough stop to those conversations, representatives from the US and Ukraine announced an agreement on March 11, 2025. The US would resume support and knowledge sharing with Ukraine, with some problems, and both agreed to work toward” a detailed contract for developing Ukraine’s crucial material resources to expand Ukraine’s business and guarantee Ukraine’s long-term prosperity and security”.
The initial news from Ukraine’s authorities stated that important minerals may likewise “offset the cost of British help”, but that collection was removed from the joint statement. Getting Russia to agree to a peace would be the next phase.
There’s no question that Ukraine has an abundance of vital minerals, or that these sources will be crucial to its postwar rebuilding. But what specifically do those solutions include, and how plentiful and accessible are they?
The conflict has significantly limited access to data about Ukraine’s natural resources. Nevertheless, as a geoscientist with expertise in asset evaluation, I have been reading professional reviews, many of them behind paywalls, to know what’s at stake. Here’s what we know.
Ukraine’s vitamins energy sectors and militaries
Ukraine’s material assets are concentrated in two volcanic provinces. The larger of these, known as the Ukrainian Shield, is a broad belt running through the center of the country, from the north to the south. It consists of very ancient, tectonic and crystalline stones.
A multibillion-year story of wrong movement and volcanic action created a variety of materials concentrated in local sites and across some larger regions.
A second state, near to Ukraine’s borders with Russia in the south, includes a gap valley known as the Dnipro-Donets Depression. It is filled with sediment mountains containing coal, oil and natural gas.
Before Ukraine’s democracy in 1991, both places supplied the Soviet Union with supplies for its industrialization and defense. A substantial industrial region centered on steel grew in the southeast, where iron, iron and coal are particularly abundant.
By the 2000s, Ukraine was a major producer and exporter of these and other materials. It also mine plutonium, used for nuclear energy.
In addition, Russian and Polish geoscientists identified debris of potassium and rare earth metals that remain uninhabited.
However, technical reports suggest that assessments of these and some other essential minerals are based on outdated volcanic data, that a considerable amount of mines are dormant due to the war, and that many employ older, wasteful technology.
That suggests critical mineral production could be increased by peacetime foreign investment, and that these minerals could provide even greater value than they do today to whomever controls them.
Why the US is so interested
Critical minerals are defined as resources that are essential to economic or national security and subject to supply risks. They include minerals used in military equipment, computers, batteries and many other products.
A list of 50 critical minerals, created by the US Geological Survey, shows that more than a dozen relied upon by the US are abundant in Ukraine.
A majority of those are in the Ukrainian Shield, and roughly 20 % of Ukraine’s total possible reserves are in areas currently occupied by Russia’s military forces.
Critical minerals Ukraine currently mines
Three critical minerals especially abundant in Ukraine are manganese, titanium and graphite. Between 80 % and 100 % of US demand for each of these currently comes from foreign imports.
Manganese is an essential element in steelmaking and batteries. Ukraine is estimated to have the largest total reserves in the world at 2.4 billion tons. However, the deposits are of fairly low grade – only about 11 % to 35 % of the rock mined is manganese. So it tends to require a lot of material and expensive processing, adding to the total cost.
This is also true for graphite, used in battery electrodes and a variety of industrial applications. Graphite occurs in ore bodies located in the south-central and northwestern portion of the Ukrainian Shield.
At least six deposits have been identified there, with an estimated total of 343 million tons of ore – 18.6 million tons of actual graphite. It’s the largest source in Europe and the fifth largest globally.
Titanium, a key metal for aerospace, ship and missile technology, is present in as many as 28 locations in Ukraine, both in hard rock and sand or gravel deposits. The size of the total reserve is confidential, but estimates are commonly in the hundreds of millions of tons.
A number of other critical minerals that are used in semiconductor and battery technologies are less plentiful in Ukraine but also valuable. Zinc occurs in deposits with other metals such as lead, gold, silver and copper.
Gallium and germanium are byproducts of other ores – zinc for gallium, lignite coal for germanium. Nickel and cobalt can be found in ultramafic rock, with nickel more abundant.
No figures for Ukraine’s reserves of these elements were available in early 2025, with the exception of zinc, whose reserves have been estimated at around 6.1 million tons, putting Ukraine among the top 10 nations for zinc.
Critical minerals that aren’t being mined – yet
Geologists have identified potentially significant volumes in Ukraine of three other types of critical minerals important for energy, military and other uses: lithium, rare earth metals and scandium.
None of these had been mined there as of early 2025, though a lithium deposit had been licensed for commercial extraction.
The largest potential lithium reserves exist at three sites in the south-central and southeastern Ukrainian Shield, where the grade of ore is considered moderate to good. How much lithium these reserves hold remains confidential, but technical reports suggest it’s on the order of 160 million tons of ore and 1.6 million to 3 million tons of lithium oxide.
If most of this could be recovered in a profitable way, it would place Ukraine among the top five nations for lithium.
Smaller volumes of tantalum and niobium, also used in steel alloys and technology, have also been identified in these reserves. Most of Ukraine’s lithium occurs as petalite, which, unlike the other main lithium mineral, spodumene, requires more expensive processing.
Rare earth elements in Ukraine are known to exist in several sites of volcanic origin and in association with uranium in the south-central portion of the Ukrainian Shield. These haven’t been developed, though sampling has indicated commercial potential in some sites, while other sites appear less viable.
Rare earth elements in high demand for superior magnets and electronics – neodymium, praseodymium, terbium and dysprosium – are all present in varying amounts in these areas. Other critical minerals are associated with these deposits, especially zirconium, tantalum and niobium, in undetermined but potentially significant amounts.
Finally, scandium, used in aluminum alloys for aerospace components, has been identified as a byproduct of processing titanium ores. Ukraine’s scandium does not appear to have been studied in enough detail to evaluate its commercial potential. However, world production, about 30 to 40 tons per year, is forecast to grow rapidly.
Ukraine’s mineral future
It’s clear that Ukraine is endowed with valuable resources. However, extracting them will require roads and railways for access, infrastructure such as electricity and mining and processing technology, investment, technical expertise, environmental considerations and, above all, cessation of military conflict.
Those are the true determinants of Ukraine’s mining future.
Scott L Montgomery is lecturer, Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.