Next Week: Earlier announcement was "fake news", Zelenskyy soooo disrespectful, doesn't happen because someone added "Ukraine surrenders to Russia" in sharpie at the last second, etc.
Seems a pretty safe bet, given the last three ye--months.
"Everything you can switch on or off likely runs on rare earths," explains Thomas Kruemmer, Director of Ginger International Trade and Investment. Rare earths are also critical to the production of medical technology like laser surgery and MRI scans, as well as key defence technologies. China has a near monopoly on extracting rare earths as well as on refining them - which is the process of separating them from other minerals.
Ergo, it's interesting that Trump was demanding Ukraine hand over control of their rare earths to the USA many weeks before his little trade war lead to China's export ban. It's almost as if he expected that to happen, which means all of the chaos you see now was planned out well in advance. That should give pause to the many here claiming the actions of the current explanation are all explained by having a 79 president suffering from dementia. Then again, quoting from https://spectrum.ieee.org/ukraine-rare-earth-minerals on getting rare earths from Ukraine:
Even without a war to contend with, it would take at least 15 years to build a mine to begin extracting rare-earth ore on a large scale, Lifton notes. And according to the terms of the draft critical materials deal, private companies would have to invest huge sums, likely a billion dollars or more, to develop rare-earths mines in Ukraine. It’s a possibility that Lifton, an IEEE member and former metals trader, dismisses as absurd. He notes that a multinational mining company, Rio Tinto Group, has spent close to US $3 billion on potential mine sites in Arizona and Alaska and still does not have the necessary licenses and permits from the U.S. Government to begin building a mine in either place."
Next Week: Earlier announcement was "fake news", Zelenskyy soooo disrespectful, doesn't happen because someone added "Ukraine surrenders to Russia" in sharpie at the last second, etc.
Seems a pretty safe bet, given the last three ye--months.
Trump is evidently vaguely aware China has him over the rare earth barrel https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1drqeev36qo Quoting:
Ergo, it's interesting that Trump was demanding Ukraine hand over control of their rare earths to the USA many weeks before his little trade war lead to China's export ban. It's almost as if he expected that to happen, which means all of the chaos you see now was planned out well in advance. That should give pause to the many here claiming the actions of the current explanation are all explained by having a 79 president suffering from dementia. Then again, quoting from https://spectrum.ieee.org/ukraine-rare-earth-minerals on getting rare earths from Ukraine:you forgot "also, due to the disrespect, rare earth minerals from Ukraine now have 200% import tariffs"