DONALD TRUMP’S demand for a $500 billion “payback deal” forcing Ukraine to hand over control of its natural resources has been exposed by the Telegraph.

As the newspaper’s columnist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard notes, proposed terms amount to a more punitive reparations package than was imposed on Germany after World War I. Not only would the US take 50 per cent of future revenues from resource extraction but it would gain first refusal on all future export contracts.

From being feted as a country on the “front line of democracy” fighting a battle on the free world’s behalf, Ukraine is now told that it owes the United States incalculable sums for having funded its war for the last three years and must mortgage its future to the hilt.

As so often with Trump, however, the turnaround is as much one of style as substance. When in his first term he admitted that US troops were in Syria “only for the oil,” he stated aloud motives that previous US presidents preferred to hide in the guise of counter-terror or humanitarian missions.

Trump’s demands are a bitter blow, even if President Volodymyr Zelensky suggested a resource deal in return for US guarantees of any peace secured with Russia. 

Yet from the start the tug of war between the West and Russia over Ukraine has been about control of resources, and the demands of Western institutions including the EU, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank have been predatory for years.

The Maidan coup of 2014 was itself a reaction to then president Viktor Yanukovych’s decision not to pursue an association agreement with the EU, which involved “full abolition of tariffs... liberalisation to allow for enhanced market access for European service providers, and enhanced protection for foreign investors...”

Yanukovych’s government feared Ukrainian industry was not aligned with EU standards: it would not be able to replace exports to Russia with exports to the EU, nor compete with major EU producers domestically, driving deindustrialisation and Ukraine’s relegation to a supplier of raw materials to more developed economies.

He was soon overthrown. “Bailouts” from the IMF and World Bank followed, in return for cuts to pensions and public-sector pay, bank privatisation and marketisation of water and energy prices, with the latter increasing twelvefold between 2013-19. 

Western institutions pushed hard too for an end to a moratorium on the private sale of agricultural land, with big agribusiness eyeing up some of the most fertile farmland on Earth. 

Deregulation of the land market was bitterly opposed by a huge majority of Ukrainians — between 70 and 80 per cent in most polls — and was the subject of such sustained protests that the Ukrainian government only succeeded in forcing it through during the Covid lockdown of 2020, when demonstrations were banned. 

Since the Russian invasion of 2022, further Western aid has come tied to what the Oakland Institute in 2023 termed a “drastic structural adjustment programme” involving further cuts to social security and privatisations.

None of this justifies Russia’s invasion, which has involved its own resource grabs — the firm Tkachev Agrocomplex, owned by the oligarch and former Russian agriculture minister of the same name, stands accused of seizing 400,000 hectares of farmland in occupied Ukraine. 

But it exposes the hypocrisy of the politicians who intone “stand with Ukraine” while imposing “reforms” which dispossess and impoverish the Ukrainian people. 

It reveals the nature of the Ukraine war as a battle over land and resources in which Ukrainian soldiers are dying on behalf of US and EU capital, not for freedom or democracy.

Now, having considerable responsibility for provoking the war, Washington mulls a carve-up with Russia over those resources. The Ukrainians are not at the table but their voices have been ignored and their interests betrayed, including by their own government, for years.