Scientists have been drafted into Ukraine's war machine to develop drones and new approaches to...
The nation’s vast deposits of critical minerals have drawn interest from Russia and the United States.
In late June, Russian forces advanced in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, seizing another few square kilometers of ground—and a significant deposit of lithium. The loss adds to a growing tally of Ukraine’s geological riches that have fallen into enemy hands. It is also one more blow to a landmark agreement that the United States and Ukraine had signed weeks earlier, enabling U.S. firms to gain access to the nation’s mineral wealth.
Under the 30 April deal, the U.S. and Ukraine pledged to establish an investment fund to rebuild Ukraine with revenues from mineral, oil, and natural gas projects. Ukraine will maintain ownership of its natural resources, while future U.S. military aid would be deemed a contribution to the fund matched by revenue from Ukraine’s mineral wealth. But with war raging, implementation largely must wait, says Anatolii Bulat, director of the M.S. Poliakov Institute of Geotechnical Mechanics (IGTM), which is tracking the fate of the country’s mineral deposits. Without lasting peace in Ukraine or a U.S. pledge to help defend Ukraine’s mineral assets, the security situation in the country will be too unstable for a long-term investment in a mine and its supporting infrastructure, the Center for Strategic and International Studies argued in a recent briefing. It noted that such projects take an average of 18 years to complete and can cost $1 billion.
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| Ukraine mineral extraction world rank (in 2021) |
|
| Gallium | 2nd |
| Kaolin | 6th |
| Titanium | 6th |
| Iron | 7th |
| Graphite | 8th |
| Manganese | 8th |
| Zirconium | 10th |
| Uranium | 10th |
In the meantime, IGTM researchers are fine-tuning their inventories of critical minerals. The institute recently completed what Kateryna Babii, IGTM’s deputy director, calls the first comprehensive analysis of Ukraine’s strategic mineral resources, as well as the factors complicating extraction. Ukraine currently prohibits public release of statistics from its extractive industries. But through 2021, the nation ranked among the top 10 countries in production of iron ore, manganese, titanium, gallium, and uranium (see table, above). It also held Europe’s richest known deposits of lithium, an alkali metal in high demand globally for use in electric vehicle batteries. In a rare implementation of the U.S.-Ukraine agreement, the Ukrainian government last month opened the door to investment in the Dobra lithium ore deposit, 300 kilometers southeast of Kyiv.
However, with the capture of the Shevchenko lithium deposit in Donetsk, Russia now controls two of Ukraine’s four major deposits. It has also seized territory holding scarce elements such as niobium and tantalum, as well as Ukraine’s biggest mine—the Zaporizhzhya Iron Ore Plant—a salt mining complex in Soledar, and dozens of coal mines. Altogether, Russia has wrested about 700 mineral deposits, nearly one-third of Ukraine’s total.
Russia has even taken aim at IGTM itself. Three drone attacks in three years have destroyed several labs at the 300-strong institute, although the blasts happened at night and no staff were injured, Bulat says. Still, he remains bullish. The U.S.-Ukraine minerals agreement may for now be aspirational, he says, but it “could be a road map for postwar revival.”
