The debris has become a hill. With the first ray of sunshine that breaks a week of cold and snow, it almost looks like a natural landscape, a black pearl mountain with trees around it and steel monsters inside. Less than two kilometres away, someone has also started to cultivate the fields, which shouldn’t be there because Inhulska is one of the largest uranium mines in Ukraine. When it’s windy or raining, the black sand enters the soil and the water table, settles on the trees and houses, and poisons. It contaminates.
The capital is Kropyvnytskyi, a former Soviet corpse lying on the Inhul river that flows as far as Mykolaiv. About 200,000 people live there, and the surrounding plain is dotted with mining villages. Here lies the Ukrainian treasure that Trump would like to turn into American, with an agreement that arouses more fears than hopes among the local population. After weeks of back and forth, and the fierce clash with Zelensky in the Oval Office, the Americans and Ukrainians resumed talks on Friday in Washington on the minerals agreement. The Ukrainians have also hired a US law firm, Hogan Lovells, to try to assert their rights in the face of punitive demands: a Washington-controlled fund to manage all mining revenues, ‘first right of refusal’ for the US, veto power over sales to third parties, favourable conditions for US companies over all others.
The other unknown is called Brussels. ‘It is important that the rules of the agreement with the USA do not prejudice Ukraine’s entry into Europe’, reasons Volodymyr Landa, senior economist at the Centre for Economic Strategy think tank in Kiev, who has estimated the country’s total reserves at 14.8 trillion dollars. New capital would be welcome, ‘but so far the logic proposed has been colonial, which is unacceptable’. There are those who hope that the negotiations will lead to a rebalancing of the situation, but everyone knows that there is no other way to guarantee American support. ‘The conditions may improve a little, but let’s not delude ourselves’, says an entrepreneur who prefers to remain anonymous in order to speak freely. ‘At a certain point we will have to choose: either to be under the Russians or under the Americans’.
Source: La Repubblica.
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