By Jim Geraghty
Wednesday, February 26, 2025
According to the Financial Times and other reports, Zelensky has
agreed to terms on the mineral rights deal that President Trump insisted he
sign. Zelensky will reportedly travel to Washington later this week.
If I were trying to persuade Trump that Ukraine is worth
defending, I would point to all that untapped wealth and attempt to get Trump
to see Ukrainian land as America’s, or as his.
But those mineral resources are not going to be easy to
obtain. For starters, two of the six rare earth deposits in Ukraine are
underneath land that is currently occupied by Russian forces. And Putin has made his own offer, arguing American companies
should mine the minerals in the territories currently under Russian control. If
you only see other countries as potential riches to plunder, the bad guys can
always make a more tempting offer.
Earlier this month, S&P Global conducted its own
review of the available information about these deposits and offered a skeptical assessment:
Zelenskyy’s rare earths offer is
based on exploration activities that took place largely between the 1960s and
1980s, when the Soviet state was actively mapping the area, industry experts
said.
The deposits would be difficult
to develop. Some are stuck behind battle lines or, in the case of the
geological record for one of the sites, require advanced processing technology
and a stable energy grid to extract. And the valuation of the deposits is based
on decades-old data: No sources contacted by Commodity Insights were aware of
any commercial exploration or assessment of those deposits in the post-Soviet
period.
“Unfortunately, there is no
modern assessment” of rare earth reserves in Ukraine, Roman Opimakh, former
director general of the Ukrainian Geological Survey, told Commodity Insights in
an email. “And there is still restriction to make this information public.”
The Ukrainian Geological Survey
is the government agency responsible for mineral development. . . .
“To my knowledge, there are no
economically viable rare earth deposits in Ukraine,” said Tony Mariano, an
independent geologist consultant with expertise in rare earths exploration. “I
have evaluated clay deposits in Ukraine thought to have potential for rare
earths but found them not to be viable. This doesn’t mean there aren’t any,
only that further exploration and evaluation needs to be done.”
I’ll remind you that there are a lot of valuable minerals
underneath the ground in Afghanistan, but they’ve proven hard to extract and
develop. Go figure, a place run by the Taliban has a “lack of a comprehensive regulatory framework and an effective
oversight body.”
And you must wonder if those Russian-occupied territories
seem like such a safe place to invest in for the foreseeable future. One of the
points that I’ve heard, and attempted to share in all three of my trips to
Ukraine, is that no matter how bad things get in the war, the Ukrainians in all
walks of life insist they will never quit, and they’re never going to acquiesce
to Russian occupation. So far on that score, they have walked the walk as well
as talked the talk.
As Wall Street Journal correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov laid out in his book, Our Enemies Will
Vanish, there was a decent amount of soft pro-Russian sentiment in
Ukraine before the war. But that evaporated the moment the Russians started
executing Ukrainian civilians. Once a country has seen its citizens piled into mass graves like the one in Bucha, nobody wants to forgive
and forget.
Do you think the Ukrainians — and anti-regime Russians and Chechens — would just let those Russian mining operations
get started and continue unmolested? Does this seem like a safe place for a
company to invest a lot of money in obtaining land use rights, mining
equipment, workers, etc.? (Also, remember, the Russian government only seizes foreign assets on days
ending in a “y.”)
Still, some experts on the Russian government — among
them It Can Always Get
Worse Substack writer Kyle Orton — say that the next Russian
leader, who didn’t order the whole war in the first place,
might be more inclined to conclude that the invasion has cost Russia far too
much in blood and treasure. Today, and as long as Putin rules, you must look
far and wide to find a Russian who’s willing to publicly declare that invading
Ukraine was a terrible mistake. But if Putin fell out of a window — that sort
of thing is just an epidemic out there; I guess Russia’s version of OSHA must be the easiest job
in the world — it wouldn’t be quite so taboo in Russian society to ask if so
little territory was worth suffering one Vietnam War’s worth of killed in
action per year. After all, Mikhail Gorbachev was willing to cut his losses in Afghanistan.
If you want a lasting peace in Ukraine, the obstacle
isn’t Zelensky, and it isn’t the Ukrainians. The obstacle may well not even
really be Russia per se — it’s Putin.
The American Who’s Helping the Ukrainians Stop the
Bleeding
Dnipro, Ukraine — In this city, when you’re
looking for a “safe space,” you’re not an easily offended delicate snowflake;
you’re looking for a reinforced concrete box on the street corner to duck into
in case of a Russian air raid.
I have met many extraordinary people in my travels in
Ukraine, but the trauma aid instructor “Twitch” — given name Steven Smith —
with Save One More Life
stands out among them. If you’re wondering why everyone calls him Twitch, he
explains in a southwestern Virginia drawl, “It’s easier to remember than
‘Steven’ was, and I’ve got Tourette’s. Just watch for five seconds, and you’ll
remember.”
Twitch spent most of his life in Lynchburg, Va., and was
a police officer in Roanoke City. He then moved to Oklahoma City, becoming a
trainer in emergency services and trauma care.
Readers, there’s no way to tell the story of Twitch
without discussing matters of faith. This newsletter doesn’t delve into those
matters often, but stick with this. As Twitch put it to me, “I don’t expect
everyone else to take the same guidance based on faith that I do, so I won’t
take offense if someone else doesn’t. However, that does guide every aspect of
my life, so to tell that appropriately, I have to include that.” Also, the rest
of this newsletter is going to be a quote sandwich, because Twitch’s story is
best told in his own words.
After a long stretch of aimlessness and frustration in
his life and relationships, Twitch gave his life to Christ. After quite a while
of what he called “low-end security jobs,” he became a police officer, and
found his new perspective made him hunger for the challenges instead of
dreading them:
When I got the opportunity to be
trained as a cop, I appreciated it. I wanted to be there, I wanted anything
they [the trainers] would do to us. I wanted the physical aspects, I wanted it
to be hard, and I wanted the benefits of hard training. We had seven months of
hard training, and then three months of field training, so a whole year,
almost, you’re in that training process.
Once I became an officer, I
noticed this tendency I had: I wanted to go and render aid to people. Some
officers were really driven to go find drugs, or go get guns off the street.
The thing I felt driven about was stopping violence, and rendering aid to casualties.
And about the time I realized that was my passion, the frequency of me getting
to a scene where somebody was shot or stabbed was high, much higher than
normal. And I felt this drive that I was supposed to step in, and regardless of
what the person had done prior to my arrival, I was supposed to render aid to
the best of my ability. Tourniquets, chest seals, gauze, whatever. And I
combined that with prayer, it felt very spiritually driven for me.
It kind of made me a unicorn, I
was a weird dude on the police force. I felt a weight and value in what I was
trying to do.
In 2021, Oklahoma-based Refuge
Medical Training, a first-responder training company noticed Twitch’s passion
for trauma care and offered him a job, “teaching people how to not die.” As he
describes it:
I was just presenting what I had
learned on the street, which I noticed was not the same as what gets taught in
the classroom. It was dirty, it was imperfect, it was not well lit, it was
stressed, with unknown aspects and unknown people all around you. The classroom
didn’t translate that.
Twitch told his wife, Stephanie, he wanted to switch
careers to becoming an instructor, and she concurred. Twitch became the lead
instructor at Refuge Medical and eventually wrote scenarios and curriculums. He
said that unlike most first-responder trainings, he gradually increases the
stress of the scenarios, increasing it to “drastic” levels — noise,
distractions, unexpected problems:
The first day was a basic
stop-the-bleed class, all hands-on, no PowerPoint. The second day was as close
as a ‘hell day’ as I could give them – it would start with me literally kicking
a table over and supplies would fly. And it would be like that for the next
eight to ten hours. [At another point in the interview, Twitch described the
training regimens as including, “mud crawls while wearing tourniquets, passing
100-bag sandbags, working in eight inches of water with crawdads in it,
everything.”] And by the end of class, we had shared so many stories — one of
my co-instructors was a combat veteran, he would include some of his
testimonies.
When the Russians launched the full-scale invasion in
2022, Twitch was about as far from a passionate advocate for the Ukrainian
cause as you could get:
After the 2022 full invasion, I
remember telling my wife, “Why in the world would anybody from the U.S. be
going over there? I don’t know why anybody’s getting involved. It’s one thing
for the government to send aid, but it’s a different thing for people.”
Six months [later] I was putting
gauze in a bag, getting ready for another training trip, and I just felt this
weight get thrown on me, like it was a sandbag somebody just threw on your
shoulders. I felt heavy, and it was this internal feeling. It was the closest I
think I’ve ever come to hearing God, out loud. I felt it, like, “You’re
supposed to ask if you should to go to Ukraine.” And I was saying out loud, in
the office, “I don’t want to do that.” I was seriously, talking to myself. I
was like, “people are dying there. That’s not a place I should go.” And then I
felt, “You told me you would go wherever I sent you.” I went to talk to some of
the guys I worked with, I asked them to pray with me. And they said the same
thing — “That’s a bad idea!”
Twitch talked to his wife Stephanie about what he had
felt and experienced; by this point, he was the father of two young children.
He had never been out of the U.S. beyond a trip to the Bahamas.
“She looks at me and she said, ‘no,’” Twitch laughed. “My
wife, she’s very capable on her own.” Twitch’s wife agreed to pray on it as
well. And after they both prayed on the looming question, Twitch said he felt
more at ease, and that God wasn’t telling him to go to Ukraine . . . at least,
not yet. “My wife said, ‘If the Lord is telling you to go, I’ll go with you.’”
In December, Twitch met a man in a training session in
Waco, Texas, who had been in Ukraine and whose fiancée had been “blown up in
Kyiv.” This man had joined a militia — “they were just handing out AKs at a
police station in Kyiv to anybody who wanted to help resist.” The man in Waco
told Twitch that he had never seen a real tourniquet until the class, that in
Ukraine they had run out of them and were using belts and paracord.
(At this point in the interview, in a busy shopping mall
in Dnipro, the air-raid siren went off again . . . and everyone around me just
went about their day. I’ve become a local — air-raid alerts affect me about as
much as car alarms affect New Yorkers.)
“He asked questions like, ‘Why are these guys getting
beat up in the neck when they get shot in the armor and the chest?’ And I
talked to him about spalling from the bullets and stuff. He had great
questions, genuine questions about what he had seen. He was asking, ‘How do I
keep these guys alive?’ He had seen them die. I talked to him about Jesus, we
prayed together.”
The man said to Twitch that he was thinking of returning
to Ukraine, and asked if Twitch would come with him to teach some classes on a
visit. A mutual friend agreed to go if Twitch agreed.
Twitch talked to his wife again. “I started to feel that
weight, not as bad as the first time, that I was supposed to pray about it
again.” And this time, Twitch’s wife said that if he felt like he should go, he
“absolutely” should go.
Twitch brought several duffle bags full of trauma
supplies, and said he came to Ukraine for a short trip with three goals: “One,
give the supplies to somebody who needs them. Two, teach someone some classes.
Three, leave,” he laughed, and I told him I relate. Twitch and the other men
did six days’ worth of training to Ukrainians.
“I had never taught through an interpreter before,”
Twitch said. “You talk half as much. I had to change everything about how I was
training. I had to do it with way less training equipment, in way less time.”
He ditched the PowerPoint and made the class entirely hands-on, and developed a
curriculum where he could teach five to 25 soldiers what they needed to know in
five hours.
The Ukrainians found the classes invaluable, and asked
Twitch to return. Twitch returned to the U.S. and asked his wife how she would
feel about relocating to Ukraine, with their children, for a longer stretch —
and much to Twitch’s surprise, she agreed. “She is my most important adviser.
It was cool to see how her heart changed on this.” They initially relocated to
Ukraine for two-and-a-half months.
“We were training soldiers everywhere. I was training
soldiers in Kherson before the dam blew up. I was doing training about 20
kilometers from the front.” Twitch observed that few in the media noted that
the Russians blew up the Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine,
setting off a massive disaster, in order to disrupt the then two-day-old Ukrainian counteroffensive. There are
several reasons the 2023 counteroffensive did not achieve its goals, but the
Ukrainians’ efforts were no doubt impeded by the simultaneous need to respond
to flooding that killed several hundred and forced the evacuation of tens of
thousands.
Twitch returned to the U.S. and started his
nonprofit to finance the training for anyone who wanted to take it and
couldn’t afford it. He’s trained Christian missionaries in Lebanon who had fled
ISIS in Syria.
The gregarious and easygoing Twitch now lives in Dnipro
with his family, and he travels around Ukraine, giving his first-responder
classes — to the military, to Ukrainian police, to civilian volunteers, even to
classrooms of children. The Ukrainians are lucky to have him. And while I
wouldn’t presume to speak for God or Jesus Christ, I figure volunteering to
live in a country at war — and teaching as many people as possible how to save
lives in emergencies they’re more likely to encounter because of that war — is
the sort of thing that makes The Man Upstairs proud of His creation.
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