US President Donald Trump announced that he will sign a "very big deal" with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky in the US on Friday.
Kiev and Washington have been negotiating a deal to share Ukraine's mineral wealth in exchange for past American aid and, possibly, security guarantees.
Trump is particularly interested in critical minerals, which are used for batteries and high-tech products, although significant quantities on the ground are located in territory under Russian control.
Ukraine is believed to possess large quantities of lithium - a key ingredient in batteries in electric vehicles, computers and mobile phones.
She didn't dig up any of that.
However, the US is estimated to have much larger lithium reserves of its own.
Why, then, isn't America digging up more of them?
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How much lithium does Ukraine have?
State Geological Survey of Ukraine that the country has an estimated 500.000 tons of lithium - the largest deposits in Europe.
United States Geological Survey (USGS) she estimated that in 2021, the total amount of lithium deposits in the world was 71 million tons, with the most lithium in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chile and China.
Other large sources have since been discovered in the US and China.
About three-quarters of the lithium mined goes into batteries for things like electric vehicles, computers and mobile phones.
According to research dating back to Soviet times, there are lithium deposits at the Polokhivske and Dobra locations in central Ukraine, and in the Kruta Balka region in eastern Ukraine, which is under the occupation of Russian forces.
Ukrlitividobuvaniya Mining Company received a permit to mine lithium in 2017 and was preparing to extract it from Polokhivska, which contains the largest estimated deposits.
However, "no one is sure how reliable the information about Ukraine's mineral reserves is, and Ukraine may be overstating their value," says Professor Paul Anderson of the Birmingham Centre for Strategic Elements and Critical Minerals in the UK.
How much lithium does America have?
The USGS said that in 2021 the US had an estimated 8,3 million tons of lithium deposits.
And then, in October 2024, she announced that another huge lithium deposit has been found in Arkansas, containing at least 4,5 million tons.
However, the US has only one operational lithium mine: Silver Peak in Nevada, where it is extracted from salt water pumped from a layer beneath the salt flats.
"Where it was left to the market to mine lithium and where other countries supplied it more cheaply, mining was allowed to decline," says Dr Gavin Harper of the School of Metallurgy and Materials at the University of Birmingham in Great Britain.
"Nobody in the US predicted the growth of the battery industry," says Professor Anderson.
The USGS says the country now imports half of the lithium it uses – mostly from Chile and Argentina.
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Why does the US government want more mineral reserves from Ukraine?
While China claims to hold 16,5 percent of all global lithium reserves, analysts say it refines 60 percent of its global lithium and owns about 75 percent of the world's lithium-ion battery production capacity.
"China has a clear dominance in lithium battery production and has had the foresight to develop it as a planned industrial strategy," says Dr Harper.
The US government is concerned that it will gain complete control over the supply of lithium and other critical minerals, depriving America of access.
This is becoming increasingly important, as demand for lithium is rapidly increasing.
Prema International Energy Agency, the world will need about eight times more lithium in 2040 than it did in 2023.
The US government is trying to encourage mining companies to produce more lithium at home by granting them loans through Law on reducing inflation, adopted while Joseph Biden was still US president.
US Department of Defense agreed to lend Albemarle money to rebuildthe opening of the Kings Mountain mine in North Carolina, to supply lithium to build batteries for the armed forces.
"Based on conversations with people in the US, it's clear that they want critical minerals for military production more than anything else," says Professor Anderson.
However, he says: "Trump seems most interested in Ukraine's rare earth deposits."
A new lithium deposit, estimated at 36 million tons, was recently discovered in Nevada, and a mine is scheduled to open there in 2026.
Watch the video from the BBC Serbian YouTube channel: All about lithium
Will Ukraine's lithium deposit be useful to America?
Trump wants Ukraine to hand over its share of mineral wealth as repayment for American support during its war against Russia.
However, it is not known how much lithium and other minerals will be worth once the costs of mining them are factored in, says Professor Anderson.
"We don't know the quality of these deposits," he says.
"Even if they are economically viable, it could take a decade or more to become operational and would require enormous amounts of investment and capital."
"Opening mines in Ukraine is particularly challenging, given the war and the damage it has caused," says Dr Harper.
In the report Dnipro University of Technology It says that because lithium in Ukraine is found in rocks, it is relatively difficult and expensive to mine it.
By comparison, in countries such as Australia and Chile, lithium is extracted more easily from salt water by pumping it from beneath layers of salt flats.
For this reason, the report says, it is not entirely clear whether it would be worthwhile to extract lithium from Ukrainian deposits.
Another reason why companies might hesitate to invest in lithium mining at this time is that the price of this product has decreased in the past year, and is 80 percent lower than it was in 2022.
This is due to an oversupply of it.
This could reduce the appetite of companies to open new mines in Ukraine or the rest of the world.
"After the price drops, miners may want to wait a few more years," warns Professor Anderson.
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