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      US and Ukraine sign minerals deal that solidifies investment in Kyiv’s defense against Russia

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      The US and Kyiv have signed an agreement to share profits and royalties from the future sale of Ukrainian minerals and rare earths, sealing a deal that Donald Trump has said will provide an economic incentive for the US to continue to invest in Ukraine’s defense and its reconstruction after he brokers a peace deal with Russia.The minerals deal, which has been the subject of tense negotiations for months and nearly fell through hours before it was signed, will establish a US-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund that the Trump administration has said will begin to repay an estimated $175bn in aid provided to Ukraine since the beginning of the war.“This agreement signals clearly to Russia that the Trump administration is committed to a peace process centered on a free, sovereign, and prosperous Ukraine over the long term,” said Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, in a statement.“President Trump envisioned this partnership between the American people and the Ukrainian people to show both sides’ commitment to lasting peace and prosperity in Ukraine. And to be clear, no state or person who financed or supplied the Russian war machine will be allowed to benefit from the reconstruction of Ukraine.”Ukraine’s first deputy prime minister, Yulia Svyrydenko, confirmed in a social media post that she had signed the agreement on Wednesday. “Together with the United States, we are creating the fund that will attract global investment into our country,” she wrote. The deal still needs to be approved by Ukraine’s parliament.Ukrainian officials have divulged details of the agreement which they portrayed as equitable and allowing Ukraine to maintain control over its natural resources.The Ukrainian prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, said that the fund would be split 50-50 with between the US and Ukraine and give each side equal voting rights.Ukraine would retain “full control over its mineral resources, infrastructure and natural resources,” he said, and would relate only to new investments, meaning that the deal would not provide for any debt obligations against Ukraine, a key concern for Kyiv. The deal would ensure revenue by establishing contracts on a “take-or-pay” basis, Shmyhal added.Shmyhal on Wednesday described the deal as “truly a good, equal and beneficial international agreement on joint investments in the development and recovery of Ukraine”.Critics of the deal had said the White House is seeking to take advantage of Ukraine by linking future aid to the embattled nation to a giveaway of the revenues from its resources. The final terms were far less onerous for Ukraine than those proposed initially by Bessent in February, which included a clause that the US would control 100% of the revenues from the fund.On Wednesday Trump said a US presence on the ground would benefit Ukraine. “The American presence will, I think, keep a lot of bad actors out of the country or certainly out of the area where we’re doing the digging,” he said at a cabinet meeting.Speaking at a town hall with NewsNation after the deal had been signed, Trump said he told Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a recent meeting at the Vatican that signing the deal would be a “very good thing” because “Russia is much bigger and much stronger”.Asked whether the minerals deal was going to “inhibit” Russian president Vladimir Putin, Trump said “well, it could.”UK foreign secretary David Lammy welcomed the agreement in a post on X, adding that “the UK’s support for Ukraine remains steadfast”.It was unclear up until the last moment whether the US and Ukraine would manage to sign the deal, with Washington reportedly pressuring Ukraine to sign additional agreements, including on the structure of the investment fund, or to “go back home”. That followed months of strained negotiations during which the US regularly delivered last-minute ultimatums while cutting off aid and other support for Ukraine in its defence against Russia.Ukraine’s prime minister earlier had said he expected the country to sign the minerals deal with the US in “the next 24 hours” but reports emerged that Washington was insisting Kyiv sign three deals in total.The Financial Times said Bessent’s team had told Svyrydenko, who was reportedly en route to Washington DC, to “be ready to sign all agreements, or go back home”.Bessent later said the US was ready to sign though Ukraine had made some last-minute changes.Reuters reported that Ukraine believed the two supplementary agreements – reportedly on an investment fund and a technical document – required more work.The idea behind the deal was originally proposed by Ukraine, looking for ways to offer economic opportunities that might entice Trump to back the country. But Kyiv was blindsided in January when Trump’s team delivered a document that would essentially involve handing over the country’s mineral wealth with little by way of return.Since then, there have been various attempts to revise and revisit the terms of the deal, as well as a planned signing ceremony that was aborted after a disastrous meeting between Trump and Zelenskyy at the White House in February.Earlier this month, it was revealed that the Ukrainian justice ministry had hired US law firm Hogan Lovells to advise on the negotiations over the deal, according to filings with the US Foreign Agents Registration Act registry.In a post on Facebook, Ukraine’s first deputy prime minister Yulia Svyrydenko gave further details of the fund, which she said would “attract global investment”.She confirmed that Ukraine would retain full ownership of resources “on our territory and in territorial waters belong to Ukraine”. “It is the Ukrainian state that determines where and what to extract,” she said.There would be no changes to ownership of state-owned companies, she said, “they will continue to belong to Ukraine”. That included companies such as Ukrnafta, Ukraine’s largest oil producer, and nuclear energy producer Energoatom.Income would come from new licences for critical materials and oil and gas projects, not from projects which had already begun, she said.Income and contributions to the fund would not be taxed in the US or Ukraine, she said, “to make investments yield the greatest results” and technology transfer and development were a “key” part of the agreement.Washington would contribute to the fund, she said. “In addition to direct financial contributions, it may also provide new assistance – for example air defense systems for Ukraine,” she said. Washington did not directly address that suggestion.Ukraine holds some 5% of the world’s mineral resources and rare earths, according to various estimates. But work has not yet started on tapping many of the resources and many sites are in territory now controlled by Russian forces.Razom for Ukraine, a US nonprofit that provides medical and humanitarian aid to Ukraine and advocates for US assistance, welcomed the deal, and encouraged the Trump administration to increase pressure on Vladimir Putin to end the invasion.“We encourage the Trump administration to build on the momentum of this economic agreement by forcing Putin to the table through sanctions, seizing Russia’s state assets to aid Ukraine, and giving Ukraine the tools it needs to defend itself,” Mykola Murskyj, director of advocacy for Razom, said in a statement. More

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      Tesla denies report claiming board looked to replace Elon Musk

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      Tesla has denied a report that its board sought to replace Elon Musk as its chief executive amid a backlash against his rightwing politics and declining car sales.Robyn Denholm, the chair of the board at the electric carmaker, said in a statement on Tesla’s social media account on X: “Earlier today, there was a media report erroneously claiming that the Tesla Board had contacted recruitment firms to initiate a CEO search at the company.“This is absolutely false (and this was communicated to the media before the report was published). The CEO of Tesla is Elon Musk and the Board is highly confident in his ability to continue executing on the exciting growth plan ahead.”View image in fullscreenIt followed a Wall Street Journal story published on Wednesday that claimed “board members” had contacted headhunters to recruit a successor about a month ago.The reported move came as tensions grew at Tesla around falling profits and criticism of Musk for spending much of his time in Washington, where he has been helping Donald Trump slash federal spending as de facto head of the “department of government efficiency” (Doge).It is unclear in the report whether these members were acting on behalf of the board as a collective, or if it was only some of them taking steps to find a new chief executive. The Tesla board is made up of eight people, including Elon Musk himself, his brother, Kimbal Musk, and James Murdoch, son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch.Tesla has been hit by a widespread backlash against Musk’s recent political activity, not only against his Doge work, but also his public support for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party before German national elections in February. Sales of the electric car have dropped in some of its biggest markets and there have been political protests at some of its showrooms.Last week, the company reported that profits had dropped by 71% in the first quarter of this year to $409m (£307m), compared with $1.39bn in the same period in 2024. Meanwhile, Tesla’s stock has suffered, with the company losing about a quarter of its market value this year.Musk told investors that starting from May he would be “allocating far more of my time to Tesla”. He is scheduled to leave his government role on 30 May, according to a strict 130-day cap on his service as a special government employee.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThere have long been concerns around the demands on Musk’s time. As well as Tesla, he oversees four other companies, including the space exploration company SpaceX and the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.Musk denounced the Wall Street Journal report on X on Thursday. He wrote: “It is an EXTREMELY BAD BREACH OF ETHICS that the @WSJ would publish a DELIBERATELY FALSE ARTICLE and fail to include an unequivocal denial beforehand by the Tesla board of directors!” More

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      The truth is finally dawning on Britain: toadying to Trump has got us nowhere | Emma Brockes

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      It’s not funny, of course – livelihoods if not actual lives depend on reaching a workable accord. But the news that President Trump has probably stiffed the UK into a second- or third-tier boarding group for trade talks, behind South Korea and Japan, triggers at least a snort of recognition for anyone who has experienced versions of that dynamic. The phrase “British negotiators are hopeful” followed almost immediately by use of the word “disappointed” in heavy rotation takes you, with grim amusement, back to every toxic relationship in which you have played Britain to someone else’s America.We are talking, of course, about the wisdom or otherwise of appeasing a man many think of as a tyrant, and the main takeaway from the Guardian’s story on Tuesday is that no matter how the UK pretzels itself to fit Donald Trump’s requirements, none of it will make any difference. Or rather what difference it makes, beyond the immediate relief enjoyed before the flattery wears off, is likely to be negative. It’s a rule of extortion that demands will increase with each capitulation, as Columbia University is finding out to its cost. (After caving to Trump’s demands last month in return for the restoration of $400m in federal funding, the university has not, in fact, had its funding restored. Instead Trump officials have told Columbia its concessions only represent the “first step”.)And now the UK finds itself in a similar pickle to Columbia, with any goodwill generated by King Charles’s letter inviting Trump to Balmoral apparently thrown up in the air. (One thing I’ll say for the royals is that their use of passive-aggressive semiotics in the invitation are absolutely world class: Balmoral is a mid-list palace that, while superior to Blenheim, which Trump visited in 2018 and is basically an off-site for corporate events these days, is decidedly not Buckingham Palace – a subtlety we must assume the king and his cohorts are thoroughly enjoying and Trump has no idea about whatsoever.)Anyway, where does any of this leave the UK? For now, at least, belligerence seems to be getting the better results with Trump, at least for those negotiators who have something he wants. Trump has blinked repeatedly when faced with the negative consequences of his own erratic behaviour, be that from tech companies forcing him to exempt them from tariffs or business leaders persuading him, in the wake of his commitment to putting 145% tariffs on Chinese goods, to wobble and admit they’re not sustainable.The fact is that Apple, Target and Walmart all have greater leverage over Trump than the UK does, which is why watching this latest episode of the special relationship unfold brings on, at least in British viewers, feelings of something like pathos. How many times will we keep going back? Clearly the prime minister’s jolly humouring secures better outcomes than Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s first approach at the White House, which has since been corrected to a necessary attitude of fealty. Meanwhile Canada, of all places, is now the nation telling the US in the most strident terms to take a step back and get stuffed.As in all these things, it’s the hope that kills you. Maybe if Britain says exactly the right words in the right order, keeps its breathing to a minimum, manages not to say anything annoying until we’re on the other side of the trade deal, lowers its eyes away from Europe or other allies that might trigger the rage of the aggressor, and continues to laugh at his jokes and listen to his stories, it will succeed in changing the pattern of Trump’s behaviour.The fact that this outcome is considered in any way achievable is perhaps the saddest thing of all. It’s an odd quirk of British-American diplomacy that, despite the vast disparity in power and wealth between the two countries, the sense of exceptionalism on both sides is probably equal. We really do believe we can talk our way out of anything, even when dealing with someone as capricious as Trump – a man for whom no amount of appeasement will hold longer than his mood. The king will be mobilised. The choice of Balmoral for Trump’s summer visit will rest in part on the fact that it’s harder for demonstrators bearing helium-filled balloons in the shape of Trump-as-a-baby to reach.And the diplomatic game will continue. Nothing Trump does seems strategic, but it seems both a calculated humiliation and a warning shot to steer clear of Europe to push the UK down the running order of trade talks. The question, then, becomes one of whether Britain’s poker face is a piece of canny diplomatic froideur and blithe UK negotiating or the uncertain actions of the party in an abusive relationship who understands that the moment of greatest danger is when you try to leave.

      Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist More

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      Trump news at a glance: US and Ukraine sign long-awaited minerals deal; Noem doubles down on deportation threat

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      Ukraine and the US have signed a deal pushed by President Donald Trump that will give the US preferential access to Ukrainian mineral resources and fund investment in Ukraine’s reconstruction.The accord establishes a joint investment fund for Ukraine’s reconstruction as Trump tries to secure a peace settlement in Russia’s three-year-old war in Ukraine.After fraught negotiations, which almost collapsed at the last minute, the agreement is central to Kyiv’s efforts to mend ties with Trump and the White House, which frayed after he took office in January.Here are the key stories at a glance:US and Ukraine sign minerals deal after months of negotiationsThe US and Kyiv have signed an agreement to share revenues from the future sale of Ukrainian minerals and rare earths, sealing a deal that Donald Trump has said will provide an economic incentive for the US to continue to invest in Ukraine’s defense and its reconstruction after he brokers a peace deal with Russia.Read the full storyKristi Noem says Ábrego García would be deported if returned to USKristi Noem, the US homeland security secretary, said that if Kilmar Ábrego García was sent back to the US, the Trump administration “would immediately deport him again.” Ábrego García is a Salvadorian man who the Trump administration has admitted was mistakenly deported from Maryland last month. Noem’s comments come as a federal judge again directed the Trump administration to provide information about its efforts so far, if any, to comply with her order to retrieve Ábrego García from an El Salvador prison.Read the full storyTrump officials contacted El Salvador president about Ábrego García, sources sayBehind the scenes, the Trump administration has been in touch directly with the Salvadorian president Nayib Bukele in recent days about the detention of Kilmar Ábrego García, the man wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador, according to two people familiar with the matter.The nature of the discussion and its purpose was not clear because multiple Trump officials have said the administration was not interested in his coming back.Read the full storyTrump pressures journalist to accept doctored photo as realDonald Trump lashed out at an ABC journalist in a tense TV interview to mark 100 days of his second term in office, in which among other confrontations he angrily pushed correspondent Terry Moran to agree with him that a doctored photo was actually real, telling him: “Why don’t you just say yes.”Read the full storyUS economy shrinks in first quarter of Trump 2.0The US economy shrank in the first three months of the year, according to official data, triggering fears of an American recession and a global economic slowdown. Donald Trump, who returned to the White House promising to “make America great again”, sought to blame Joe Biden for the figure.Read the full storyUS supreme court open to religious public charter schoolsThe US supreme court’s conservative majority seemed open to establishing the country’s first public religious charter school as they weighed a case that could have significant ramifications on the separation of church and state.Read the full storyColumbia student freed after federal judge orders releaseMohsen Mahdawi walked out of immigration detention after a federal judge in Vermont ordered his release. The Palestinian green-card holder and student at Columbia University had been detained and ordered deported by the Trump administration on 14 April despite not being charged with a crime.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Detainees at an immigrant detention center in the small city of Anson, Texas, sent the outside world a message as a drone flew by: SOS.

      The US is treading the path followed by democracies that descended into authoritarianism and dictatorship, former ambassadors to countries that underwent autocratic takeovers warned.

      The Trump administration is moving to cancel $1bn in school mental health grants, saying they reflect the priorities of the previous administration.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 29 April 2025. More

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      Trump officials contacted El Salvador president about Kilmar Ábrego García, sources say

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      The Trump administration has been in touch directly with the Salvadorian president Nayib Bukele in recent days about the detention of Kilmar Ábrego García, the man wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador, according to two people familiar with the matter.The nature of the discussion and its purpose was not clear because multiple Trump officials have said the administration was not interested in his coming back to the US despite the US supreme court ordering it to “facilitate” Ábrego García’s release.The contacts produced no new developments after Bukele rejected the outreach, the people said. The supreme court had ordered the administration to return Ábrego García to the US so that he would face immigration proceedings as he would have, had he not been sent to El Salvador.The discussions appeared to be an effort by the Trump administration to window dress the underlying legal case and build a paper trail it could reference before the US district judge Paula Xinis, who previously ruled that Donald Trump raising the matter in the Oval Office was insufficient.Ábrego García has since been moved out of Cecot, the mega-prison officials known as the terrorism confinement center, to another prison in El Salvador since the supreme court ruling which the administration has repeatedly tried to manufacture uncertainty around or otherwise misrepresent.The recalcitrance from the US administration to comply has been on display for weeks as senior Trump advisers have become increasingly determined to use it as a case to test the extent of presidential power and its boast that the courts have no practical way to ensure quick compliance with orders.At a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said he would “never tell” if he had been in touch with Bukele. CNN earlier reported Rubio has had discussions with Bukele directly. The New York Times reported there had been a diplomatic note sent to Bukele.“I would never tell you that. And you know who else I’ll never tell? A judge,” Rubio said as he sat next to Trump, adding it was “because the conduct of our foreign policy belongs to the president to the united states and the executive branch, not some judge”.And in an interview with ABC News that aired the night before, the US president himself said he “could” tell El Salvador to return Ábrego García.When it was raised to him that he had the ability to call Bukele and say “send him back right now”, Trump deflected responsibility. “I’m not the one making this decision. We have lawyers that don’t want to do this,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe remarks could yet pose major headaches for the justice department in court as it prepares in the coming weeks to face a series of probing questions from Ábrego García’s lawyers, in writing and in depositions, about the administration’s efforts to comply with the supreme court ruling.By Trump saying that his lawyers had told him not to call Bukele, it could open the department up to bruising questions about whether they were deliberately flouting the order and place them in threat of contempt.After a closed-door hearing on Wednesday in federal district court in Maryland, Xinis refused the justice department’s request to extend a pause in discovery proceedings, ordering it to respond to questions from Ábrego García’s lawyers about his detention by this Friday.Xinis also said in an expedited deposition schedule that Ábrego García’s lawyers could interview up to six administration officials – including Robert Cerna, a top official at Ice, and Joseph Mazarra, the acting general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security – by next Thursday. More

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      Trump’s loyal footsoldiers doff their Maga caps at cabinet love-in

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      There were navy blue and red baseball caps up and down the table, strategically placed in front of every cabinet member, and each bearing the message “Gulf of America”.Yet the unorthodox collection of headwear, embroidered with Donald Trump’s forced new name for the centuries-old Gulf of Mexico, was far from the most bizarre aspect of an extraordinary White House gathering hosted by the president on Wednesday.The cabinet meeting to commemorate the first 100 days of Trump’s second term was, in the view of some social media commentators, something more akin to a gathering of Kim Jong-un loyalists in North Korea, each successive speaker trying to outshine the other in heaping lavish praise on their dear leader.There was the sight of Elon Musk, the outgoing head of the unofficial “department of government efficiency”, placing one of the red Gulf of America hats on top of the Doge one he was already wearing.There was also an outing for a favorite Maga – Make America Great Again – conspiracy theory, with the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, repeating the debunked claim that 300,000 unaccompanied migrant children were somehow “lost” by the Biden administration.Pam Bondi, Trump’s hand-picked attorney general, played the role of chief cheerleader, causing the president to nod his head as she commended him.“Mr President, your first 100 days has far exceeded that of any other presidency in this country ever, ever,” she gushed. “[I’ve] never seen anything like it, thank you.”Recalling her Tuesday visit to the Drug Enforcement Administration she added: “They said to me you, Donald Trump, have taken the handcuffs off of DEA agents.”It was, however, some peculiar allegations made by Kennedy concerning the Biden-era health and human services (HHS) department that really raised eyebrows, coming soon after “loud quacks” from the health secretary’s duck-themed cellphone ringtone interrupted Trump, the Associated Press reported.“We have ended HHS, as the role as effector, the principal effector in this country, for child trafficking,” Kennedy said.He went on: “During the Biden administration HHS became a collaborator in child trafficking for sex and for slavery. And we have ended that and we are very aggressively going out and trying to find these children, 300,000 children that were lost by the Biden administration.”During his campaign for the 2024 election, Trump repeatedly misrepresented government data to falsely claim that 300,000 migrant children who crossed the border unaccompanied had gone missing, and said many of them were trafficked or likely to be dead.The children were not in fact lost or missing. HHS data recorded only the numbers crossing the border, and tracking ceased when they were placed in homes and communities with relatives already in the US.Kennedy did not expand on the “aggressive” efforts his department was making to try to find children who were actually never missing.Much of the rest of the two-hour meeting, and a question-and-answer session with the media, was consumed by Trump talking up the perceived accomplishments of his first 100 days. He attempted to distance himself from Tuesday’s bleak economic data that suggests the US could be heading for a recession on the back of his tariff policies:“I’m not taking a credit or discredit for the stock market,” he said. “I’m just saying we inherited a mess.”Yet when the stock market was soaring during the final year of Biden’s presidency, Trump frequently insisted it was because investors were buoyant at the prospect of him returning to the White House.The president was asked by a reporter on Wednesday if he had spoken with Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, about the tariffs that have sparked a potentially costly trade war between the countries, and have led to predictions of empty shelves before the end of the year as imports dry up.Trump said he had not, and offered his own prediction as to how Christmas might look for American families.“Somebody said, ‘Oh, the shelves are gonna be open.’ Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls,” he said.“So maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally.”The Associated Press contributed to this report More