Trump’s Russia Realignment Takes Shape

Happy Wednesday! A Delta Dental poll released yesterday found a 14 percent year-over-year drop in the tooth fairy’s average rate for a single lost tooth—from $5.84 to $5.01. In this economy, even mythical creatures are feeling the strain.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• Taiwan’s coast guard apprehended a cargo ship and its crew of eight Chinese nationals off the island’s southwest coast on Tuesday after discovering the vessel near the site of a recently severed undersea internet cable. The incident followed mounting reports of cut cables in the South China and Baltic Seas, raising concerns that ships may be dragging their anchors in deliberate efforts to damage the undersea infrastructure at the direction of China and Russia. Taiwanese authorities said Tuesday that they are investigating whether this latest example—which a Chinese government spokeswoman dismissed as a “common maritime accident—had been an act of “intentional sabotage.” 
• Multiple outlets reported Tuesday that Washington and Kyiv had struck a deal to jointly develop Ukraine’s natural resources. The latest draft agreement, which Ukrainian officials said they hope will be a step toward improved relations between the two countries, reportedly dropped a previous U.S. demand to access $500 billion in potential revenues from the venture. The deal also lacks American security guarantees or promises to continue weapons shipments to the war-torn country—two of Kyiv’s key requests. President Donald Trump indicated Tuesday that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would visit Washington, D.C., on Friday to finalize the agreement.
• President Trump on Tuesday signed a memorandum suspending the security clearances held by the employees and partners of Covington & Burling*—a prominent Washington, D.C.-based law firm—who aided Jack Smith, the former special counsel who oversaw investigations into Trump. The proposal also directed government agencies to review their existing contracts with the firm and “align their agency funding decisions with the interests of the citizens of the United States.” The move followed Smith’s disclosure to the Justice Department that he had received $140,000 worth of pro bono legal services from Covington in preparation for possible retaliatory action by the Trump administration.
• A federal judge on Thursday ordered the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development to end their freeze on the disbursement of foreign aid by 11:59 p.m. ET on Wednesday. The ultimatum followed U.S. District Judge Amir Ali’s ruling last week that the Trump administration had not fully complied with his February 13 order to continue distributing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of foreign assistance. Following the latest ruling, the government agencies appealed Ali’s order to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. 
• The House of Representatives voted 217-215 to pass a Republican-backed budget bill, with Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky joining Democrats in opposition of the measure. The resolution, which calls for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and $2 trillion in government spending cuts over the next 10 years, followed the Senate’s passage of a narrower bill last week. With Tuesday’s vote, Republicans moved one step closer to unlocking the reconciliation process, which would allow them to sidestep a Senate filibuster in a victory for President Trump’s domestic policy agenda. 
• GOP Rep. Byron Donalds on Tuesday formally announced plans to run for governor of Florida in 2026. Speaking to Sean Hannity on Fox News, the 46-year-old congressman praised Florida’s current governor, Ron DeSantis, who is term-limited but has indicated that his wife, Casey, may consider entering the race. President Trump, who won the state by 13 points in the 2024 election, wrote on Truth Social last week that Donalds had his “Complete and Total Endorsement.” 

‘It Was Provoked’

“All responsibility for the possible bloodshed will lie fully and wholly with the ruling Ukrainian regime,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a speech that aired in the early hours of February 24, 2022. Within minutes of the speech, missiles began raining down on Ukraine as the Russian juggernaut began its invasion. 

As the third anniversary of the war arrived this week, President Donald Trump and senior White House officials have spent recent days echoing Putin’s justifications for launching the largest and deadliest European conflict since World War II. Trump suggested earlier this month that Ukraine “may be Russian someday,” and he said last week that Kyiv “should have never started” the war. “It was provoked,” Steve Witkoff, the special envoy to the Middle East who’s involved in negotiations with Russia, said of the conflict Sunday. “It doesn’t necessarily mean it was provoked by the Russians.” He went on to repeat Putin’s dubious claims that NATO expansion forced Moscow to invade. 

But perhaps the starkest demonstration of Washington’s apparent realignment unfolded before the United Nations on Monday. Speaking before the General Assembly, Dorothy Shea, the acting U.S. ambassador to the U.N., urged member states to reject a resolution condemning the Russian invasion. The resolution ultimately passed, but the U.S. was among the 18 countries that voted no along with Russia, Belarus, and North Korea. Later on Monday, the U.S. once again joined Moscow in support of a U.N. Security Council resolution that called for an end to the war but made no mention of Russia’s role in starting the conflict. 

Meanwhile, American officials have floated potential positions and concessions favoring Putin’s goals apparently without any apparent compromises from Moscow in return. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, and Witkoff met with senior Russian officials in Saudi Arabia last week, but Ukrainian representatives were not invited to the meeting. 

“We’re not going to pre-negotiate an end to this conflict,” Rubio said in Saudi Arabia when asked what concessions he expects from the Russians. The comments followed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth effectively doing just that earlier this month by taking off the table Ukrainian membership in NATO and the return of the land Russia took when it invaded Crimea in 2014—Hegseth walked back his comments the following day. Rubio also raised the prospect of the U.S. partnering with Russia on geopolitical and economic issues if the conflict ends.

In Washington’s dealings with Kyiv, Trump has carried out a public pressure campaign targeting President Volodymyr Zelensky in ways consistent with his years-long grudge against the Ukrainian leader. In addition to blaming Zelensky for the war, Trump called the Ukrainian leader a dictator last week and refused to do the same for Putin when prompted by reporters on Monday. The president’s comments drew some gentle pushback from a handful of GOP senators. 

In the last week, the administration had been negotiating an agreement with Ukraine over U.S. access to future profits from the country’s mineral deposits. Zelensky first floated the idea of an economic partnership with allied countries involving minerals last October as part of his “Victory Plan.” But the terms of the Trump administration’s initial proposal—under which the two countries would jointly develop Ukraine’s natural resources—looked less like an economic partnership than a punishment. 

Trump framed the agreement as a way for Kyiv to pay back the U.S. for its military aid throughout the war, but the draft demanded that Ukraine pay $500 billion for the military assistance and aid the U.S. has provided—a sum multiple times larger than the value of America’s total support. The U.S. has appropriated $183 billion to respond to the war, which includes direct military and economic assistance to Ukraine but also tens of billions spent to replenish U.S. military stocks. 

“I can’t sell our country,” Zelensky said in response to the initial draft. A second draft came over the weekend that was reportedly even more punitive, seeking 50 percent of the country’s revenues from not just minerals but also oil and natural gas—some analysts described the initial terms as more characteristic of China’s deals with African nations than the American model of economic partnerships. Ukrainian representatives have pushed for security guarantees to be included in the deal, but U.S. officials have resisted the calls. “This is the best security guarantee they can hope for,” Waltz said of the deal last week. “More than another pallet of ammunition.”

By Monday, officials from both sides were saying a deal was close, and yesterday, several outlets reported the agreement text had been reached. None of the details have been confirmed as the deal has yet to be released publicly. But reports citing unnamed Ukrainian officials indicated the U.S. had relented on the $500 billion demand. The agreement would reportedly create a fund that Ukraine would pay into with a portion of the profits from future mineral development—Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described the contours of such a fund in an op-ed he wrote last week advocating for the agreement. The fund would reportedly be used to support investments in Ukraine, and the U.S. would also have a financial stake in the fund that would be determined in subsequent agreements. 

“The American taxpayer now is going to get their money back plus,” Trump said Tuesday while answering questions on the agreement in the Oval Office. “It could be a trillion-dollar deal.” When asked what Ukraine would be getting in return for the agreement, Trump seemed to cite only past American aid, referencing his previous incorrect claims that the U.S. had already given Ukraine $350 billion.  

But analysts say it would take years, potentially decades, before the U.S. or Ukraine would see substantial profits from mining minerals. While the country has a wealth of natural resources, Ukraine’s mining and extraction of critical minerals, particularly rare earth metals, is relatively undeveloped. “There is very limited data on whether Ukraine’s rare earth elements and other strategic materials are commercially viable to mine,” Gracelin Baskaran and Meredith Schwartz, critical mineral analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in a report last week. They cited data showing the average time to bring a new mine online is nearly 18 years. 

Another complicating factor is how much of the country’s mineral deposits lie in Russian-seized territory. Some estimates suggest as much as 40 percent are in areas under Russian occupation, while Zelensky estimated that less than 20 percent of Ukraine’s deposits are controlled by Russia. 

Outside of the minerals deal, Trump did offer vague support for security guarantees for Ukraine. “You are going to need some form of peacekeeping, so something will be done that’s satisfactory to everybody,” he said Tuesday. “We’ll be looking at that, security.” Ukraine seems to be angling to use the deal as a jumping-off point for broader conversations with the Trump administration about security. “The minerals agreement is only part of the picture,” Olha Stefanishyna, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister and justice minister who has led the negotiations, told the Financial Times Tuesday. “We have heard multiple times from the U.S. administration that it’s part of a bigger picture.” 

The president expressed confidence in his comments on Tuesday that the commitments could be handled easily. “We’ll be looking at that, security,” Trump said. “I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.”  

“I spoke with Russia about it, they didn’t seem to have a problem with it,” he added. “They’re not going back in. Once we do this, they’re not going back in.” 

Worth Your Time

• Writing for City Journal, Sanjana Friedman chronicled the strange and meteoric rise of Urban Alchemy, a nonprofit providing services to homeless people in San Francisco. At the organization’s founding in 2018, its annual revenue was just $35,000. Today, that figure exceeds $70 million—largely thanks to government contracts secured in the wake of the 2020 “defund the police” movement, as city officials moved to outsource public safety to NGOs. “On paper, Urban Alchemy does not ‘police’ the homeless. Its practitioners do not enforce laws, protect property, or evict those encamped in public spaces. Instead, they pursue what the nonprofit calls ‘complementary strategies to conventional policing and security’ by, for example, trying to engage unruly and potentially violent people in conversation to de-escalate situations. … This model often leads to subpar results—to put it generously—on the ground, both for UA employees and their clients. In Sausalito, a wealthy Marin County town that had brought in the organization to work in ‘several city-sanctioned homeless camps,’ per the San Francisco Standard, homeless residents alleged that UA practitioners ran a ‘criminal syndicate’ that involved trafficking crystal meth in the camps and sleeping with and physically assaulting residents,” she wrote. “Neither homelessness nor homeless-services spending has declined in San Francisco while Urban Alchemy has been active. In 2019, the city’s homelessness budget was $368 million, and an estimated 8,035 people were living in shelters and on the streets; in 2024, the homelessness budget was $846 million and an estimated 8,323 were in shelters and on the streets. Overdose deaths peaked in the city last year. Retail stores continue to flee the downtown area. Yet money flows to the nonprofits unabated.”

Presented Without Comment

Reuters: Trump Floats $5 Million ‘Gold Card’ as a Route to U.S. Citizenship

Also Presented Without Comment

Financial Times: Apple Promises to Fix Dictation Bug That Replaces ‘Racist’ With ‘Trump’

In the Zeitgeist

One of the busiest actresses in Hollywood, Nicole Kidman, is at it again—this time depicting a teacher and homemaker in the thriller Holland. The delightfully creepy take on life in Holland, Michigan, is set to premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival before hitting Amazon Prime Video on March 27. 

Toeing the Company Line

• In the newsletters: Nick Catoggio wondered what the foreign policy hawks in the administration got in return for “selling out” to Donald Trump.
• On the podcasts: Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and Mike Warren discussed what it’s like to cover the Trump administration, the U.S. about-face on Ukraine, and the future of conservatism from the 2025 Principles First summit. Plus, Steve was joined by Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, to discuss Christie’s endorsement of Trump in 2016 and consider where the line of a “constitutional crisis” is. And on today’s Remnant, Michael Rosen and Jonah Goldberg contemplate the future of artificial intelligence. 
• On the site: David Drucker reports on the Democratic Party’s lackluster outreach to young men, Kevin Carroll pushes back on proposed cuts to intelligence spending, Charles Hilu breaks down congressional efforts to avoid a government shutdown, and Jonah Goldberg reflects on the Trump administration’s many Ukraine mistruths. 

Let Us Know

What are your initial impressions of the U.S.-Ukraine minerals deal?

Correction, February 26, 2025: Updated a typo in the spelling of Covington & Burling.