Rare Earths Reality: Ukraine's Nonexistent Deposits | Hacker News Reader

Rare Earths Reality: Ukraine's Nonexistent Deposits

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30 pointsrbanffy10 comments

I'm from Kiev, Ukraine, and I have talks with Ukrainian scientists, and will tell shocking things.

All these are semi-truth. All what said everybody on these things.

Real truth is simple - we just don't know, because Ukraine is unexploited.

None serious researches made before become independent state, because Russia was higher priority in USSR.

None serious researches made after become independent, because approximately before 2014 was slow transform from totalitarian state (satellite) to democracy, and just after another step to democracy, began war of 2014, in 2022 transformed to full scale aggression.

So, before 2014 Ukraine had other priorities than resources exploration, and unfortunately, now also have another priorities.

What I really know, Ukraine just gather things just from surface. What I mean, before 1917 was known, that coal deposits and oil exist at east Ukraine and under USSR was large mining of coal and appear few oil rigs.

Some western companies tried to begin exploration in Ukraine, but because of political issues (just instability), all these tries become very long term perspective projects.

Even exist few rare-earth mines, but as I hear before 2014, they abandoned, because nobody in Ukraine or outside want to make investments, until Ukrainian government will become more stable.

You could google image: mineral resources of ukraine. At least known large deposits of Uranium and Lithium, just because they are so large, don't need any special equipment to know. Rare Earth things are usually seen in trace amounts in deposits of things like Uranium or Gold, they are not independent deposits, so need deep (and expensive) research of known deposits.

I believe, when we will achieve peace, even temporal treaty (like Korea live more than 50 years with temporal treaty), Ukraine will continue evolution to democracy country, but for now, nobody could answer, when will peace happen.

And yes, I already invested my time to know, how exploration doing and even seen some software packages to see deep under surface, and know few people who worked on this before.

While all this is certainly true, it misses the simple political reality: The deal exists purely as a distraction to justify cutting aid. This whole discussion only benefits Putin and his assets in the white house. It doesn't even matter anymore if you believe Trump knowingly or unknowingly works for Russia, because it's clear he got played hard. There is no mystery. It's either corruption or incompetence. Maybe both.

Definitely both. "Malicious stupidity" keeps repeating itself in my head every time I read anything about this administration.

The first time around his stupidity made him accidentally staff the Whitehouse with people who have integrity like Mattis and Kelly. Which helped limit the damage he could do. Which helped him maintain his electability.

This time around he knows better than to hire anyone who has a shred of decency if he wants to be unconstrained. So this term is already shaping up to be much more damaging than the last.

I hope that after he's done wrecking everything and the true consequences of his ways are plainly visible that his ideas and attitude will become taboo, but I'm not holding my breath. So far his base has been impervious to reality.

"Why are both establishment dems and reps both anti tariff? This is collusion! I'm going to vote for an outsider who really appreciates tariffs"

one economic crash later

"Oh, maybe that's why the establishment is anti tariff"

Or, more likely: "the wicked and deceptive establishment have yet again managed to sabotage the brilliant and noble efforts of America's best ever leader. The only way America can be saved now is to suppress these treacherous anti American rabble rousers so that they can't keep the real American heros down."

It misses a key point that affects this.

If there were no or few rare earths and the deal only asked for 50% of this small/non-existant resource then Ukraine would have signed it.

They didn't sign it in part because it asked for basically half the countries mineral resources, gas, oil, coal etc.

Which makes more sense if, to your point, the deal was to make an unreasonable offer that couldn't be accepted, and use that to make the current Ukraine government look bad.

Ukraine did signed the deal.

Just as an aside, while the developed world is worried about rare earths and China's monopoly, I wonder why no one is investing in Vietnam, where they have the second largest deposit and have been producing rare earths for years? In fact, some contacts there have said that their biggest concern is not mining and production, but rather having long-term and stable sales contracts.

Of course, demand fluctuates and the market price is not stable. Large scale mining is capital intensive and prone to pollution. But is there more to it? I dig a little deeper and find out that in 2022 the USGS estimated the rare earth deposits in Vietnam to be around 22 million (metric) tons, but in 2024 reduced its estimate to only 3.5 million tons. A reduction of almost 10 times points to the problem here: nobody knows for sure how much is really there, which makes large investments very risky. I think the situation is the same elsewhere. And that makes Trump's craze with rare earths a bit suspect.

[1] https://pubs.usgs.gov/myb/vol3/2022/myb3-2022-vietnam.pdf

[2] https://investingnews.com/daily/resource-investing/critical-...

A problem with this article is it could easily give people the incorrect impression that there isn't significant mineral wealth in Ukraine (and occupied Ukraine). There certainly is, potentially trillions of dollars worth: https://united24media.com/business/ukraines-mineral-resource... Sure, these specific types of deposits may not be valuable. But there's plenty of other types of resources that are valuable, and many mines were/are operational.

Russia didn't invade Ukraine just because. They're doing it to steal valuable land and resources. They're not just evil or misguided. They're rational evil.

russia is huge, it has unexploited land and resources than it couldn't use up over a millenia

the reason they invaded is a combination of putin wanting to build a legacy and not wanting former USSR countries on their border doing better than russia due to liberal democracy

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