How Can the US and Russia Negotiate a Peace Deal Without Ukraine?

I thought I saw one very awkward side of the table and one uh extraordinarily surprised side of the table the room is in Saudi Arabia on one side of the table the US delegation the other side the Russian government delegation they’re discussing how to restart their relationship after years in the Deep Freeze and how to begin the first tentative steps to negotiating peace in Ukraine although notice there’s no one from Ukraine in that room what’s going on and what the implications we will discuss them on this episode of the
BBC’s Daily News podcast newscast hello it’s Adam in the newscast studio and we are recording this episode at just about halfast 6 on Tuesday the 18th of February I just think it’s very good to be transparent about where we are in the timeline when world events are moving so quickly and later on in this episode we’re going to zoom in to one issue in particular that has been mentioned a lot in the last few days when it comes to any future negotiations about Ukraine and it is the issue of rare Earths and critical minerals which
everyone seems to think will be on the table whatever form the negotiations take and the form that those negotiations have taken today is Ukraine not being included because in those talks in that room in Riad it was the US and it was Russia president zalinski was visiting turkey instead now now who better to join all these dots for us and link up what’s happening now with what’s happened in the decades past than the BBC’s legendary Globe Trotter John Simpson who joins us now hi John Hello nice to speak to you it was very nice to
see you filming your your TV show in in at the front entrance of broadcasting house today and even better to now get you on newscast um in addition um I mean I’m thinking you’ve probably looked at a lot of pictures of negotiations around big tables in your career what did you think looking at the pictures from Riad today with the US on one side and Russia on the other well I thought I saw one very awkward side of the table and one uh extraordinarily surprised side of the table of course I may be reading all
that into it but the aid side of the table I thought was the American side um and the uh amazed pleased and still not quite kind of got got to come to terms with its side was the Russian side I mean you’ve got to remember that just a matter of days ago um the the Russian State Vladimir Putin the president of Russia they were on the out they were out in the cold and suddenly not only are they back but they’re back in the Center and they’re back with only one person to talk to who today was the Secretary of State of the United States
that is an amazing turnaround and it’s something which makes an awful lot of of uh the United States’s Partners in Europe feel really nervous about and we’ll come on to the European angle in a second but why why’ you say that the US looks a bit awkward well I think Mar Rubio uh is a a man who does understand uh international relations um much better than his boss for instance much better than president Trump and I think he knows how awkward this position is I mean what what’s happened is that there
were two major uh concessions which the United States under normal circumstances would have extracted from Putin in order to to get Putin to the conference table like that one was um to just simply say to him look you’re out in the cold what are you going to give us uh in exchange for letting you back in that’s one thing and for the other thing is that Chief negotiating card that the US had which was um to say that uh there was no question of Ukraine joining NATO now I mean in normal times an American
delegation would say we want Ukraine to be in NATO and if forced way down the negotiations they would say all right well we’ll put a hold on that for the time being instead before any negotiations have started the Americans have given that up I mean those friends of mine American uh diplomats as well as um British French others who just think this is a very strange way of conducting business um and we should just remind people that that Ukrainian membership of NATO has been US policy under many many presidents it’s not just something that
Joe Biden invented because of the Russian invasion like George W Bush was pushing for it in the ughs that’s right since 2008 it’s it’s been American policy and it’s been everybody else’s policy inside NATO too I mean one or two countries less less enthusiastic about it but basically it was an alliance decision that at some stage Ukraine should join and they papered over the disagreements by having a very long vague timeline right let’s look at some some some black things in black and
white so we’ve we’ve done the imagery here’s the actual text so that we got a readout from the US state department after this meeting and there’s four bullet points and the first three are the most important ones bullet point number one they’ve agreed to establish a consultation mechanism to address irritants to our bilateral relationship and then they talk about taking all the necessary steps to normalize their um their rep respective diplomatic missions that is basically code for going back to
normal relations and just imagining there’d never been a war in Ukraine isn’t it it it is and you can imagine I mean I don’t know the inside of this of course I don’t think anybody does but you can imagine how uh pleased uh President Putin would be by that so from that I assume that this was a a Russian uh uh initiative which the Americans agreed to and then the second bullet point is to appoint respective highlevel teams to begin working on a path to ending the conflict in Ukraine as soon as possible in a way that is enduring
sustainable and acceptable to all sides and actually we can now hear Marco Rubio explaining that in his own words because he did a little bit of a news conference after the meeting and then John I’ll get your reaction the work remains today is the first step of a long and difficult Journey but an important one and president Trump is committed to bringing an end to this conflict and as he said when he campaigned for president and he wants it to be end in a way that’s fair he wants it to end in a way that’s
sustainable and enduring not that leads to another conflict in two to three years that’s not going to be easy to achieve but he’s the only one in the world that can begin that process Donald Trump is the only leader in the world that could initiate that process process and today was the first step in in in that process now John to my ears that sounds like a process that might be a bit more inclusive to Ukraine than the US has sounded in the last week or so and maybe a little bit hinting at that that Russia might have to give something
as opposed to the US giving up lots of things as you were just describing what’s your interpretation of where we’re at with this this process yes I mean I think that’s that’s fair enough I think uh that that is Marco Rubio saying um look you’re not going to walk all over us on this uh and that’s that’s important and of course that process the the negotiating process is absolutely essential I mean this is not this is not a A pro-russian or a Russian success or or or something like that I mean it’s
this is what any uh negotiating partner would talk about and they will of course have to uh get rid of all the bumps along the road the one thing is the other as I listened to Marco Rubio saying that I thought you know it’s a court the um the the presidency of uh of Donald Trump it’s a it’s a court like a with a monarch and you’ve got all the courtiers of whom Marco Rubio is one and there’s lots of lots of others Elon Musk is another and they’re all trying a jostle for position at the moment so
they all want to praise uh their their boss because praise is one of the ways in which you show your your your loyalty so that I think is is part of it and the third thing I would say is that Marco Rubio in particular must be very aware uh that uh Donald Trump is in a hurry he wants to get this done by Easter if it isn’t anywhere near Easter if we’re still talking about this in the early summer then that is not going to look very good for president Trump and president Trump is perhaps and this is something that many diplomats are
worried about is going to be prepared to give away things in order to get the Speedy process finished no I’m going to create a bit of Jeopardy now and I’m going to leave the third bullet point for a second because it leads on to the second half of this podcast so like pause the the reading out of the bullet points from the state department for a second but John just my kind of last point to you before we do that is um the European reaction so we saw that very hastily arranged Summit among some European leaders and Kier starmer in
Paris on on Monday afternoon um no real definitive outcome from that although lots of diplomats saying the fact that they met was kind of was the victory there for them um how do you assess kind of the the European landscape today on Tuesday a day a day later well I’m trying to think of the right way to say a landscape in absolute chaos I can’t think of ital Challenge and of course um the diplomats tight lip to always say things like it was a success just to get everybody there in fact it was pretty disastrous with just about every country
Britain and France were closer than than most but Germany I mean the the German Chancellor leaving early not at all happy with what he heard the the Polish um prime minister saying we will under no circumstances put boots on the ground in any kind of Peace uh force in in in Ukraine uh individual other countries saying one thing thinking others speaking perhaps with for tongues it was was um pretty embarrassing performance and if I were President Putin watching it I would be rubbing my hands with delight at this at the prospect of
Europe simply not just not speaking with one voice but having problems speaking with six or seven voices I think what’s interesting my thought last night having recorded newscast and it’s sort of still all unfolding my thought once I kind of got home and the dust had settled a bit was it it made me realize why starmer had been so explicit um on Sunday night when he wrote his piece for the telegraph saying he was considering um what how Britain could contribute troops to any peacekeeping deployment and I
think it was a number of things it was to look like somebody who was saying yes as opposed to all his European Partners saying no it was to just create some momentum and it was to make it look like he wasn’t any kind of block in this process it all makes a bit more sense now when you then see the forces that arranged against him around that table well yes you see he’s got two two things to to uh uh to achieve here one is to show leadership qualities because that’s important back in Britain but it’s also important uh in in in uh NATO
politics generally and and indeed with the United States but the other thing is that he cannot afford to allow himself to go out on a limb with other European leaders in attacking and criticizing Donald Trump he’s got to try to keep Donald Trump in play while at the same time presenting himself uh as a as a a leading figure within NATO and that means keeping the the European leaders happy so it’s a very complicated thing that he’s trying to do and um so far he seems to be doing it moderately well but
I suspect that’s mostly because so many of the other leaders are in such disarray that he looks quite good by comparison and it’s yet another reminder that um negotiating with your own side is the first thing you’ve got to do because um we’ve now had comments from Sergey lavro from Russia saying Russia wouldn’t accept any forces of Any Nation in Ukraine in any kind of role whether it was peacekeeping or otherwise so actually um the ne negotiations with Russia are a completely different thing
from the negotiations with with themselves right let’s bring me back to um the third bullet point then in this state department read out of the meeting and this is a really intriguing one and I’ll read it out and it says the meeting was about laying the groundwork for f future cooporation on matters of mutual geopolitical interest and historic economic and investment opportunities which will emerge from a successful end to the conflict in Ukraine what a trumpy and kind of business deal I’ve got a
great casino to sell you kind of sentence that is but you know I mean the word that jumps out of that is investment isn’t it because the what what does Russia need most it needs to be able to trade again on equal terms it needs to be able to export it needs to be able to import and what’s the the the greatest problem that the Russian economy has received over the the past three years has been the disruption to its ordinary trade of course we know it’s continued in many ways we know uh that for instance um um
European countries EU countries have been U buying actually more in terms of of uh Russia’s uh oil and gas than they’ve been supplying in Aid to Ukraine so they’re actually helping Russia more than they’ve been helping Ukraine even though they they wouldn’t want to to to say that publicly but the key thing uh that the Americans have is to be able to dangle that idea towards the Russians that they can actually um start to come back and get rid of the sanctions and we can move towards a different
relationship and guess who was sitting by Sergey lro’s side was the chief Russian trade negotiator effectively the man that knows most about trade and is most concerned about trade so shows what the Russians want there but this is why I love studying diplomacy because the multiple meanings that exist in individual words so you interpreted the word investment as uh lifting Russian sanctions unfreezing Russian assets Russia re-entering the global economy fully I read it as dividing up the spoils in Ukraine between the US and
Russia spoils such as valuable minerals and metals in the ground well you may be right although that would I mean for that to be correct that would have to be pretty kind of blatant on the American side’s uh part I mean it’s possible I mean you may well be right it’s clear to it’s absolutely clear that that is what Trump wants I mean everybody always say says he’s transactional which actually just means to he wants something back for whatever he gives um and he that is what he seems to want from from uh from Ukraine is the
the kind of rare minerals and rare Earths that Ukraine contains but I I I can’t help thinking that the real purpose of that was to say to to the Russians look we’re prepared to listen to your interests and will will will help you whether it’s uh in carving up something that belongs in fact to the ukrainians I I don’t know you may well be right um John thank you so much and um I’ll just let newscasters KN know that they can see the the program you were filming which is unspun World on on I player every every week every week and
on BBC too but that doesn’t apply to your a lot of your viewers as we on demand now John On Demand on demand of course you are I’m I’m not surprised thank you for listening to our demands today okay all the best to you hope that wasn’t me Diplomat splaining to the great John Simpson there but I think we were we just had differing interpretations of a particular word but let’s um double down now on my interpretation of that word investment opportunities because there’s been lots of discussion over the last few days
about the rare Earths and critical minerals as they’re known in Ukrainian soil this is metals like lithium and materials like zirconium and titanium and one called niobium which actually I’d never heard of before and this is because lots of people are saying Ukraine has got these things in its territory and they will end up on the negotiating table in some way as part of any deal whether Ukraine is involved or not and there’s lots of numbers floating around about how much these materials and substances could be worth just as
like there’s lots of speculation about who might actually want to get their hands on them and in what form that will happen somebody who spent their whole career studying these rare Earths and critical minerals is Dr Julie kinger who’s a visiting fellow at The Institute for human Sciences in Vienna in Austria and she was also a contributor to a radio 4 documentary series on this subject a few months ago and she’s now here on newscast hello Dr kinger hello there is it exciting having the whole world now thinking about your subject
area first of all well I have to say I hope it was under I hope it would be under happier circumstances but uh anything we can do to help folks think more clearly about Rare Earth elements and critical raw materials is a good thing well thank you for helping us today on newscast um first things first just explain to us what we’re talking about when we say rare earth metals or rare earth materials and I was quite surprised because actually it doesn’t mean that they’re actually rare uh yes that’s right this is such an
important thing to get right out of the gate so the term Rare Earth elements refers to 17 elements of the periodic table 57 to 71 if you want to be specific plus Scandium and Atrium that’s quite different from a much larger set of metals and minerals that are considered critical right so for example lithium titanium Platinum these are often talked about as rare or critical but they’re not part of the same family as rare Earth elements and in fact Rare Earth elements are not all that rare right that’s a misn that I think has
stuck around for more than a century because it’s exciting and why are they C rare I looked into that question myself fairly extensively I think the story goes back to the late 1700s when the first oxides were identified in Sweden and at that time when they were first identified no one had ever seen them before and so they were presumed to be rare of course then uh geological research proceeded over the next Century or so and and the first mention that I found of a a chemist lamenting this misnomer is from a journal article that
was published in 1907 Rare Earth elements are in fact not rare uh they were believed to be so when they were initially discovered uh but since then uh chemists and material scientists and specialists in the field know the difference well I love I love the fact that us nonexperts have been getting it wrong since 1907 that’s kind of weirdly reassuring um and then when you talk about critical minerals what’s the real definition there then if is it critical as in they’re very very important or critical as in like a critically
endangered species like actually the definition of rare Ah that’s a really interesting that’s a really interesting question so a number of different countries and political blocks have their own critical minerals or critical raw materials lists and in order to make it on that list for that particular country or political block that material needs to be crucial to various industrial applications um and it also needs to be part of a supply chain that may unfortunately be vulnerable to disruption so several
different Rare Earth elements are also included on critical minerals or critical raw materials lists but the lists are much bigger than the lanite series that I just mentioned okay right let’s go through some of these substances then and you can just give me like a little pen portrait of what each one is and then we’ll talk about it kind of in a in a Ukraine context um you mentioned some of them already though what what is lithium used for why are people so hungry for it uh so lithium is actually not a rare Earth element it’s a
critical element and the reason it is a critical element is because it’s so important for uh for rechargeable batteries and these rechargeable batteries are used in just about everything you can think of from of course EVS right which are critical for energy transition goals to perhaps not so critical applications such as disposable vape pen right that’s another example and then just about every household appliance uh or Gadget that you might have that has a rechargeable battery might chances are that’s also a
lithium ion battery so that’s why this material is in such high demand these days okay zirconium so zirconium is an interesting element right because it’s not actually a rare Earth element but it tends to co-occur with Rare Earth elements so it’s used in a number of different industrial applications for polishing for Alloys for things that are maybe a little bit less glamorous than than lithium um and also perhaps a little less glamorous than say neodymium or prmium which are the superstars of the high power magnets
that are used in a variety of applications from renewable energy to defense demium could be a a description of me in this conversation um what about niobium ah so niobium niobium is an interesting element because it also tends to cooccur with the lanthanide series with those Rare Earth elements but niobium itself is not actually a rare Earth element even though it is often included on critical raw materials lists uh niobium is is perhaps better known in its form uh as colan which is a Shand that uh combines colite and talite
which are in fact two elements that are often found together and that uh colan uh Rose to to International prominence surrounding Revelations and concerns around its role as a conflict mineral in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo uh but in fact niobium production globally um I’m pleased to say is actually concentrated in two pretty well regulated and managed mining operations one in Brazil and one in Canada okay and we won’t go through them all but one last one titanium ah so titanium this is the
Superstar of various Aerospace alloys surgical instruments uh defense applications as well um and it’s used to make uh uh it’s used to make alloys that are more temperature resistant but are also lighter and therefore more energy and fuel efficient uh so chances are if you look at an impressive Bridge or a pipeline or an airplane uh you’re looking at a fair amount of this as well thank you for that that tour of the the periodic table including critical minerals as well as rare Earths I was having a very sort of gener generous
generous description there um now in terms of the situation in Ukraine okay podcasting isn’t the greatest medium for drawing a map but how would you describe the the distribution of these things in that country okay so you the first thing to get clear about is that Ukraine is a large and varied territory and so like any large and vared territory there’s lots of interesting geology that’s happening there um and so at a general level what I’m saying about Ukraine could be said about just about any other
large and geologically varied territory there are of course uh deposits of all sorts of designated critical materials and critical raw materials and including some uh Rare Earth elements but lately there’s been a lot of a lot of excitement around this 12 trillion doll figure uh that was referred to uh by the US uh referring to Ukraine’s Rare Earth reserves but I think it’s important to clarify that according to the best estimates that I’ve been able to review this $12 trillion uh figure actually
refers to hydrocarbons oil and gas and coal which are not Rare Earth elements um and what yes so what else should we bear in mind when we hear those numbers being bandied around for example I was reading an article today quoting somebody saying oh they’re actually based on estimates from the end of the Soviet era they’re actually out ofd guess anyway oh of course so anytime we see any monetary figures attached to a deposit we need to be skeptical right because those monetary figures are based on what the price is at a certain point
in time and as we know commodity prices always change uh the other thing that we need to keep in mind is that there’s a big difference between the estimated value of a deposit that is still in the ground and what it might ultimately become right in order to translate that geological deposit into money uh the material needs to be mined it needs to be refined and it needs to be processed into value added products the technological Goods or components that we’ve been referring to and where that value added processing takes place is
decisive for determining who gets to cash in right and so for these purposes in a much more broader picture this is why uh we’ve seen a number of different uh primary uh primary resource exporting countries around the globe uh experimenting with ways to get more of the value added processing occurring within their domestic soils and this is the case uh whether we’re talking about Indonesia or whether we’re talking about the United States right capturing that value added processing is really what
translates uh geological deposits into money so basically you’re just taking the rock out of the ground it’s actually the person that that that purifies the rock for the actual materials that makes the money precisely right and so this is a this is a big question for a place like Ukraine right it there are scenarios under which developing different critical raw materials reserves could in fact be an engine for postconflict economic recovery and development but for that to be the case the material needs to not only be taken
out of the ground in Ukraine but the value added processing needs to happen on Ukrainian soil under Ukrainian control and as far as I can understand it uh the proposals coming from the White House don’t include any such plans yeah that was going to be my next question what’s your understanding of what Donald Trump thinks he might be getting or negotiating to get here and I asked that question hesitantly because it’s quite hard sometimes to interpret actually the truth of of what’s going on there well precisely and I think experts
have to be really careful not to make sense of something that maybe doesn’t have a whole lot of indepth sense to it so I think I my best understanding of this offer or deal coming from the White House is that is it is that is is that it is a pretty straightforward effort at a kind of transactional relationship um however it does raise some very serious questions about what the ramifications might be for say rare earth and critical raw materials industries that have been doing uh have been doing their Dam dist in the United
States to get up and running for the past decade and a half right not just in the United States but in Australia and elsewhere critical raw material uh Industries uh have been having a really hard go of it for the past decade and a half in order to get their operations up and running in part because the price is relatively stable and relatively low and so if under the hypothetical scenario of at say um billions or perhaps even trillions of uh additional critical raw materials were brought under production in Ukraine uh I think the White House
would have to think very carefully about what that might mean for domestic industry in the United States because it could it could have a depressant effect on on domestic production absolutely and I haven’t seen that uh consideration um and we should also say though that for people who’ve been paying attention to what president zalinsky of Ukraine has been presenting in his various plans I mean he himself raised the prospect of access to these materials a good few months ago this hasn’t just emerged out of Donald
Trump’s head in the middle of the night last week oh absolutely and I think it comes down to the fact that these that these minerals these deposits hold tremendous potential right tremendous potential wealth and that’s what people are quite excited about and uh under a postconflict development and Recovery plan that has that value added processing happening in Ukraine you know in partnership with Western allies with with the EU and potentially the the US it could be be a really fantastic and generative um economic and political and
supply chain stability scenario but that requires very careful planning that requires very careful foresight and it also requires quite importantly very careful management of the potential and social and environmental harms that are associated with large-scale industrial production of these critical raw materials and I’m guessing from from what you’ve been saying in the the last bit of this conversation you’re from a a school of thinking that actually country trees that have these resources under
their soil should be the ones that benefit from it you’re kind of you’re sort of philosophically and politically opposed to the idea of these being extracted in a sort of neocolonial way well we’ve seen what the neoc what the colonial or neocolonial mode of extraction does um over the past I would say couple of centuries but more to the point uh that mode of uh socially and environmentally violent extraction doesn’t lead to Greater suppli chain security it leads to Greater uh supply chain and price volatility and if in
fact our goal is supply chain stability then there needs to be much more careful and much more collaborative planning around the extraction and production of these materials so so an economic argument as much as a kind of moral or historical one absolutely I mean the two are are frequently counterposed uh but if your real concern is geopolitical stability they’re Inseparable and I’m just thinking when the invasion started around about three years ago did you think oh this will end with rare Earths and critical minerals being on the
negotiating table you know it’s an interesting question uh because Rare Earth elements are in fact not rare that there are plenty of other options uh for developing Rare Earth elements and other critical raw materials that have been mentioned with reference to Ukraine um you know I there’s always the possibility that there’s always the possibility that these might become a bargaining chip um or as they’ve featured right and in fact mentioned yourself the Ukrainian president has mentioned as a possibility
for incentivizing uh greater investment and collaboration uh but there’s nothing I would say unique about Ukraine’s deposits that would necessarily make them feature um in in in the conflict interesting Dr Clinger thank you very very much okay thank you and you can hear more from Dr Clinger and the origins of rare Earths and why they’re so critical for the future of the World by listening to the Scramble for rare Earths which is available now on BBC sounds and I would highly recommend listening to after this
episode of newscast which is now because that’s it we’ll be back with another newscast very soon thanks for listening bye-bye