U.S. Threat to Cut Starlink Access Provides Major Leverage Over Ukraine

Amid rising tensions between the United States and Ukraine since the inauguration of the Donald Trump administration in mid-January, Washington has placed Kiev under considerable pressure to provide American firms with unprecedented access to the country’s vast mineral reserves as a condition for continued support for its ongoing war effort with Russia. One of the significant steps taken to increase pressure was the warning by United States Special Envoy for Ukraine and Russia Joseph Keith Kellogg Jr. that Ukraine faced an “imminent shutoff” of its Starlink satellite service it did not sign a deal on critical minerals with the United States. “Ukraine runs on Starlink. They consider it their North Star,” one source informed Reuters, adding that losing its service “would be a massive blow.” Starlink communications have played an indispensable role in the conflict since its outbreak in February 2022, with multiple sources concluding that support from the satellite network alone had more of an impact on the military campaign than the military supplies from all European Union member states combined. The loss of Starlink has the potential to devastate the command and control capabilities of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, which at a time of mounting losses and Russian advances could prove to be decisive.

Ukraine’s mineral wealth is estimated to be split between approximately 20,000 deposits holding 116 types of minerals, the large majority of which are unexplored. Reserves are estimated to be worth $14.8 trillion. When faced with American demands to receive ownership of 50 percent of the country’s mineral wealth, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has stated that he “cannot sell our country,” to which the new White House National Security Adviser Mike Waltz responded that this reaction was “unacceptable.” “Here’s the bottom line: President Zelensky is going to sign that deal, and you will see that in the very short term,” Waltz added regarding American demands. Rhetoric from Washington towards Kiev has become increasingly hostile, with U.S. President Donald Trump on February 19 having branded Zelensky a “dictator without elections, stating that he was “very disappointed” with his failure to resolve the ongoing war with Russia. “You’ve been there for three years, you should’ve ended it… You should’ve never started it,” he stated of the conflict, marking an unprecedented endorsement by a Western head of state of the narrative that Kiev, rather than Moscow, was to blame for the initiation of hostilities. This has placed further pressure on Kiev to regain Washington’s favour by making major concessions on ownership of its mineral wealth.

A leading challenge in efforts to ensure American access to Ukraine’s minerals is that the bulk of Ukrainian-claimed resources are located in disputed territories either under Russian control, or in active conflict zones.Up to 40 percent of Ukrainian-claimed metal resources are in full Russian controlled areas while at least two of Ukrainian-claimed lithium deposits are also held by Russian forces in the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions. The United States and broader Western Bloc’s industrial vulnerability due to limited reserves of rare earths, placing them at a significant disadvantage to China, is considered to be a leading reason for the Trump administration’s focus on securing such resources in the Ukrainian theatre. Other sources have speculated, however, that portraying Ukraine as unwilling to reach a compromise on access to its resources is intended to allow Washington to disengage from the conflict, which has long been a policy objective of many influential figures associated with the Trump administration. Senior Advisor to the President Elon Musk has notably in the past endorsed Washington’s use of its political clout to gain favourable access to key resource deposits, stating in 2019 following a Western backed coup in Bolivia that provided access to invaluable Lithium mines: “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” The Trump administration’s efforts to annex Greenland into the United States are similarly thought to be heavily influenced by the perceived value of the territory’s significant estimated mineral deposits.