While the US and Russia try to grab Ukrainian resources, the EU and China have their eyes on natural resources in other parts of the world. Andy Storey argues that the current imperial tensions have parallels with those in the late 19th century, which is why Irish people need to reject the drive towards militarism and the undermining of Irish neutrality.
The Ukrainian city of Donetsk, currently occupied by Russian forces, was originally called Hughesovka, after the Welsh industrialist who established an iron works and collieries there in 1870. John Hughes and a Welsh workforce were invited by the Russian Tsar (the region was then part of the Russian empire) in an industrialisation drive that aimed to allow Russia catch up with developments in Western Europe. Those developments included military advances, such as the armour plating that Hughes had pioneered for ships and which particularly piqued the Tsar’s interest.
Hughes and his colleagues were not alone. In the late 19th century French, German, Belgian, Dutch and other firms established themselves in Ukraine to help extract resources such as gypsum and coal. Employment was generated but it was often dirty and dangerous work that scarred the environment and displaced many locals from their homes. Poisoned and impoverished workers contracted cholera and other diseases.
Imperial Faultlines
Professor Victoria Donovan makes the point that “Ukraine has long been located at the intersection of empires. And these empires have often collaborated to plunder the country’s resources, offering little or nothing in return.” It is useful to recall this history as Trump belligerently demands US access to Ukrainian resources today. Neither Trump nor Putin is alone in his pursuit of the treasures with which Ukraine is both blessed and cursed, nor is Ukraine the only site where this competition plays out. The scramble for the earth’s resources – in which China, Europe and others are also vigorously engaged – continues, as it did in the 19th century, to wreak environmental havoc and feed military build-ups, even as it often spawns violent conflict in the countries concerned.
The Trump plan (adapted from a proposal initially put forward by Ukraine and that was already under consideration by the Biden presidency) to access the resources of Ukraine – purportedly to reimburse the US for its military aid – is, as yet, vague. A fund of some sort, probably under US control, is to be established with 50 per cent of the profits from the sale of Ukrainian assets to be deposited in that fund, though the precise calculation of profits and distribution of proceeds is unspecified. Some of the resources in question are specified, including what might be termed ‘traditional’ ones such as coal, gas, oil and uranium. There is, for example, an estimated 2 trillion cubic metres of natural gas under the Black Sea.
But attention has also focused on resources whose full importance has only become apparent in more recent years. An example is lithium, essential for the batteries of electric vehicles, and of which Ukraine may possess 500,000 untapped tons. Other resources at issue include titanium (needed for a range of aerospace, medical and other applications), graphite (also an input into electric vehicle batteries), gallium (crucial for semiconductors) and germanium (which helps construct fibre optics and solar panels).
To this list can be added so-called ‘rare earths’ – 17 metallic elements that are deployed in everything from smartphones and wind turbines to military hardware. The military angle is especially striking – an F35 fighter jet needs some 400 kilograms of rare earths, a nuclear submarine 4,200 kilograms. The US Department of Defence identifies rare earths as crucial also for the manufacture of Tomahawk missiles and ‘smart’ bombs. These are the modern equivalents of the armour plating for ships that so appealed to the Russian Tsar in the 19th century.
China’s Capacity
It is therefore unsurprising that the US is concerned about the extent to which China currently dominates the rare earths sector, with up to 80 per cent of such earths used in the US being imported from China in recent years. China accounts for an estimated 60 per cent of all the world’s rare earth deposits and for 90 per cent of the separation and refining capacity necessary to transform them into usable product (Western companies lag far behind in this regard).
The search for non-Chinese supplies (including of critical raw materials more generally, not just rare earths) assumes particular urgency in the context of escalating US-China economic and military rivalry, even as Trump’s long-term approach (if there is one) towards China remains unclear. China halted or restricted some exports of critical raw materials, including gallium and germanium, in 2023, highlighting Western vulnerabilities. It is no coincidence that Greenland, another target of Trumpian acquisitiveness, is itself a source of rare earths and other important minerals, nor that locals fear what the consequences of their exploitation would mean for their way of life.
Russia, the US and China are not the only players in this deadly game of resource rivalry. European interests are also at stake. In 2024 the EU adopted a Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) “which aims at ensuring a diverse, secure, and sustainable supply of critical raw materials for the EU’s industry. Secured access to critical raw materials is essential for strategic sectors including clean technologies, digital, defence and aerospace industries”. As the EU embarks on its plans to massively boost Europe’s weapons spending, securing vital inputs for the military sector is likely to become ever more of a priority.
Of the 34 minerals the CRMA deems vital to Europe, Ukraine possesses 22. In fact, the EU signed a specific raw materials deal with Ukraine just months before the Russian invasion, at which point Ukraine was already a major supplier of iron ore, lithium, manganese and steel to Europe.
EU’s Demand
The EU CRMA is partially based (and often justified) on the need for a clean energy transition away from fossil fuel reliance, and, as a UN report documents, there is no doubt that “copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, and rare earth elements, are crucial components in many of today’s fast-growing clean energy technologies”. But it is not all clean and green. To take just one example, rare earths are often found within radioactive materials and their extraction can involve the leaching of dangerous toxins into water supplies. Environmental damage may characterise the extraction of ‘new’ minerals just as much as it did the extraction of iron ore by John Hughes in Ukraine in the 19th century.
Resource extraction is typically associated not just with ecological harm but also with violent conflict – in at least two ways. First, as noted, increased military capacities (like fighter jets) demand increased supplies of resources like rare earths – war machines need these resources. Second, avarice for the resources may itself incentivise and generate conflict – in this sense, they breed conflict. Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine is not driven entirely by the hunger for valuable resources but that factor plays its part, with 20-40 per cent of Ukrainian mineral deposits estimated to now be in Russian hands. Trump seems happy to reward Russia’s resource grab by cutting a deal with Putin (as well as the one with Zelenskyy) to allow the US access those minerals.
Imperial EU
But Europe is also perfectly willing to reward those who breed conflict and steal another country’s resources. I have written here before about how EU agreements with Rwanda (under the CRMA) facilitate that country’s theft – directly, or via proxy militias – of tungsten, cobalt and gold from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and of the ghastly human cost of the conflicts Rwanda foments in order to purloin those precious commodities.
The most recent phase of conflict has led to an estimated 3,000 deaths (mostly civilians), the displacement of over 700,000 people and sharp upticks in the incidence of summary executions, abduction (including of children) for forced labour, rape and other sexual violence. Millions have been left without access to food, clean water and medical care, prompting upsurges in malaria and measles and risking the outbreak of a cholera epidemic. The EU claims to condemn Rwandan actions but the New York Times observes that “so far [the EU] has maintained close cooperation [with Rwanda] on security and strategic minerals” and has refused to suspend its agreement with Rwanda under the CRMA.
The EU also backs Rwandan military intervention in Mozambique in order that Rwandan businesses, a French corporation (Total) and the government of Mozambique can divvy up the profits from natural gas fields. As one observer notes vis-à-vis Mozambique, “The only beneficiaries are the politically connected elites who receive the crumbs left on the table by the international corporations. The local populace is left to watch as their agricultural and fishing livelihoods are adversely affected”. Substitute “the Tsar and his cronies” for “politically connected elites” and that sentence could have been applied to Ukraine in the time of Hughesovka.
Battles to control vital natural resources (and to deny that control to rivals) have long been a feature of imperialism. Some of the resources themselves may change (European elites brutalized Congolese people to loot rubber in previous eras, they benefit from local warlords’ murderous plunder of cobalt in the DRC today) and new actors and sites of struggle are always emerging.
No To European Exceptionalism
For those of us who are Europeans, we have a particular responsibility to resist claims of European exceptionalism which seek to posit Europe as a benign force for good in the world (as if the EU Commission President’s shameless support for genocide in Gaza was not evidence enough to refute that). Instead, we need to remind ourselves and others of Europe’s history of exploitation when it comes to the resources of the Global South, and of how that history is perpetuated into the present day by initiatives like CRMA.
Closer yet to home, Irish people need to reject pressure to help build the European war-making capacities that will inevitably, unless they themselves are successfully opposed, be deployed to play their part in ripping off the earth and its inhabitants in the years to come.
