“If he’s looking to renegotiate the deal, he’s got big problems,” President Donald Trump said of his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, in an impromptu interview on Air Force One on April 1. The deal in question involves the transfer to the United States of rights to Ukraine’s rare earth elements and other natural resources, in repayment for US aid, conservatively valued at $117 billion, and possibly for a US role in brokering with its European allies a guarantee for Ukraine’s future security. The idea behind such a deal originated with Zelensky during the Biden administration, which did not follow up, and was revived by Trump in February.
Zelensky has gone back and forth on entering into such a deal with the US, but it is entirely possible that he will be convinced or cajoled into one, particularly if doing so is a predicate for a continued US diplomatic role in negotiating a ceasefire, an eventual peace treaty with Russia, and any US role in arranging for Ukraine’s postwar security.
There was a prior Ukraine-Russia deal over a century ago, toward the end of World War I. While the November 1918 armistice ended the war on fronts where the Western Allies were engaged, the war on the Eastern Front had ended earlier in 1981 in a treaty signed at the frontier fortress of Brest-Litovsk, between Germany and its allies on the one hand and Vladimir Lenin’s newly established Soviet government on the other. A month before that, however, a more moderately leftist Ukrainian regime based in Kyiv concluded a separate peace treaty.
Like Putin’s regime now, Lenin’s government then confronted a costly and unpopular war and refused to recognize Ukraine as an independent country. Instead, Lenin boosted a pro-Russian regime based in the eastern and largely ethnic Russian city of Kharkiv, which he insisted was Ukraine’s true government. As Ukraine’s leadership moved toward independence, which it formally declared in January 1918, Lenin demanded that Kyiv make its resources available to the new Soviet state, counteract White Russian opposition activity on its territory, and allow free movement of Soviet military forces – all familiar demands from Russia’s contentious relationship with Ukraine in the post-Soviet era.
When the new Ukrainian government refused these demands, Lenin invaded. Kyiv’s new government immediately sought maximum international recognition and assistance, including from Germany and its allies, as well as the Western Allies, who – still at war with Germany – had tried hard to keep Russia in the larger war but refused to recognize Lenin’s government and instead supported its anticommunist White Russians. Ironically, the White Russian leaders also strongly opposed Ukraine’s independence as part of a larger program to restore as much as possible of Imperial Russia.
Then as now, the Ukrainians were after a security guarantee against Russian revanchism. At Brest-Litovsk, Germany conducted parallel negotiations with the delegations from the Soviet government and the independent Ukrainian government, with the Soviet delegation, led by Lev Trotsky, refusing to recognize the Ukrainians. As the negotiations continued, Soviet forces expanded their presence in Ukraine, eventually forcing the Ukrainian government to flee Kyiv. Faced with national annihilation, the Ukrainians cut an expedient deal not unlike the one currently under discussion. In exchange for broad access to Ukraine’s resources, Germany and its allies issued a security guarantee to defend Ukraine’s independence from Russia.
For a few weeks, the deal worked. The Germans and their allies deployed 450,000 troops who quickly routed the Soviet forces, restored the Ukrainian government to Kyiv, and cleared the rest of the country within roughly the same borders it had with Russia in 2014.
In March 1918, the Soviets agreed to a larger peace treaty that ended the conflict on the entire Eastern Front. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk acknowledged Ukrainian independence and made many other territorial and economic concessions to the Germans, their allies, and other Imperial Russian regions that sought independence from Moscow. It reduced Soviet Russia’s western borders approximately to what they had been before 1654, prior to Muscovy’s acquisition of any territory in what is today Ukraine, and also ousted it from the resource-rich Caucasus region. Internal Soviet opposition was fierce, but Lenin managed to sell the treaty to his comrades as a “breathing space,” a tactical retreat that would allow the new communist regime to recover its strength and, at some future time, possibly recover what had been lost.
For the Germans, the price of Brest-Litovsk was the continuing security guarantee. It required one million German troops, more than twice the number they had committed to restore Ukraine’s independence after that country’s earlier separate peace treaty. This was essentially a long-term garrison to maintain an eastern imperium whose resources had been surrendered under existential duress and were still coveted by a wounded powerful neighbor to the east. Within only a few weeks, the Germans soured on Ukraine’s leadership, which had serious flaws, a highly disrupted economy, and, ultimately, limited means to defend itself long-term against a much more powerful neighbor.
By April 1918, the original Ukrainian separatist government was overthrown by a tsarist general who attempted to rule an authoritarian nationalist state, relying heavily on the Germans. Still at war on the Western Front, Germany badly needed its troops deployed in Ukraine for its last-ditch offensive in France, which failed. In a supreme irony, the November 1918 armistice nullified the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and required Germany to evacuate all of the eastern territories. As soon as the Germans were gone, the Red Army came back with a vengeance, recaptured Ukraine and other (but not all) separatist areas, and eventually routed the White Russian opposition as well.
The lesson for today should be that any security guarantee to Ukraine, whether leveraged on a resources deal or not, will require a long-term, open-ended, and costly commitment of military power. This commitment should be shouldered by the Europeans, who have expressed a willingness to increase the size and power of their militaries in response to the Russian threat. For the United States, which is building forces in Asia against rising threats there, and with existing threats in the Middle East, Ukraine going forward should be more of a diplomatic and less of a military commitment. The best outcome would be for President Trump to secure the resources as compensation for military support and leave the force component of a security guarantee to the Europeans.
