Ukraine, Russia react to controversial US minerals sharing deal
ABC News
LONDON — The U.S. and Ukrainian governments touted the signing of a controversial minerals sharing deal as a launchpad for expansive bilateral economic cooperation — and as a signal of America’s long-term investment in a free Ukraine.
American and Ukrainian representatives signed the accord in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday after months of tense negotiations, President Donald Trump long having framed the proposal as means to recoup more than $100 billion worth of aid given to Kyiv since Russia launched its invasion three years ago.
“This partnership allows the United States to invest alongside Ukraine to unlock Ukraine’s growth assets, mobilize American talent, capital and governance standards that will improve Ukraine’s investment climate and accelerate Ukraine’s economic recovery,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a video announcing the deal.
The full details of the agreement are yet to be released, with Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal expected to present the deal to the Ukrainian parliament — the Rada — on Thursday. Shmyhal this week previewed some parts of the agreement, saying it would not undermine Ukraine’s potential for accession to the European Union.
The deal will also need to be ratified by the Ukrainian parliament, members of which suggested on Thursday it was too early to fully evaluate the agreement.
“I don’t know what we have signed,” Oleksandr Merezhko, a lawmaker representing President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s party and the chair of the parliament’s foreign affairs committee, told ABC News.
“Judging by the statement of the prime minister, it is better than the initial version,” he added. “It seems like we have managed to dodge Trump’s idea to turn the previously-provided U.S. military and material aid into Ukrainian debts.”
The lawmaker suggested it was too early to say whether the deal represented a win for both Kyiv and Washington.
“It seems like Trump put pressure on us in an attempt to get a victory in his first 100 days in office,” Merezhko said. “The devil is in the details. But politically there are upsides. First, we have improved relations with Trump for whom it’s a win.”
Other members of parliament suggested that ratification would not be immediate. “I would really like to see the final document of the agreement,” lawmaker Oleksiy Goncharenko wrote on Telegram.
Lawmaker Yaroslav Zheleznyak, meanwhile, suggested it may take until mid-May for the parliament to vote on the minerals agreement — “and that’s only if everything is submitted to the Rada on time,” he wrote on Telegram.
In Russia, Dmitry Medvedev — the former president and prime minister now serving as the deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council — framed the deal as a defeat for Kyiv.
“Trump has broken the Kyiv regime into paying for American aid with minerals,” Medvedev — who through Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has become known for his hawkish statements — wrote on Telegram. “Now they will have to pay for military supplies with the national wealth of a disappearing country,” he wrote.
Nonetheless, Bessent said the agreement “clearly to Russian leadership that the Trump administration is committed to a peace process centered on a free, sovereign and prosperous Ukraine over the long term, it’s time for this cruel and senseless war to end the killing must stop.”
Bessent also said this deal was because of “President Trump’s tireless efforts to secure a lasting peace.”
ABC News’ Oleksiy Pshemyskiy, Nataliia Popova and Michelle Stoddart contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — By the time President Donald Trump and MAGA podcaster Steve Bannon sat down for lunch on Thursday, the president had already approved a plan on how the U.S. might attack an Iranian nuclear facility.
American diplomats and their family members were being offered military evacuations from Israel, while the military began moving aircraft and ships to the region.
The USS Nimitz – an aircraft carrier that can carry some 60 fighter jets – was set to arrive in the Middle East by the weekend with several smaller ships by its side.
Officials said the extraordinary show of force would be needed if Trump pulled the trigger on the military option – both to strike Iran’s deeply buried nuclear facility and to protect the some 40,000 U.S. troops who Iran and proxy militant groups could target for retaliation.
Trump had just emerged from a meeting with advisers in the Oval Office, where sources say he was warned: A U.S. attack on a key Iranian nuclear facility could be risky, even with a massive “bunker-buster” bomb believed to be able to penetrate some 200 feet through hardened earth.
The bomb, known as the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, had only been tested, but never used in a real-life tactical situation, experts say. And the exact nature of the concrete and metal protecting the Iranian nuclear site known as Fordo isn’t known, introducing the chance that a US strike would poke a hornet’s nest without destroying it.
Bannon, who had already spoken with the president by phone ahead of their lunch, thought all of it was a bad idea, according to several people close to him.
Sources say he arrived at the White House for his previously scheduled lunch with Trump armed with specific talking points: Israeli intelligence can’t be trusted, he planned to say, and the bunker-buster bomb might not work as planned. The precise risk to the U.S. troops in the Middle East, particularly the 2,500 in Iraq, also wasn’t clear if Iran retaliated, he would add.
A White House official insists that by the time Trump sat down with Bannon for lunch the president had already made a decision to hold off on a strike against Iran. That decision was relayed to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt who then went to the podium, telling reporters the president would decide “whether or not to go” within two weeks.
Another senior administration official dismissed the idea that the “bunker-buster” bomb might not work.
“This Administration is supremely confident in its abilities to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program. No one should doubt what the U.S. military is capable of doing,” the official said.
Still, Bannon’s extraordinary access to Trump this week to discuss a major foreign policy decision like Iran is notable considering Bannon holds no official role in the military or at the State Department. Bannon declined to comment on his lunch with Trump, saying only Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “needs to finish what they started.”
“Bannon in a lot of ways has been – day in and day out – delivering a very, very tough and clear message” against military action, said Curt Mills, executive director of The American Conservative, who also opposes military action in Iran.
That strategy, Mills said, has been key to countering other Trump loyalists who favor teaming up with Israel for a strike.
“You can call it infantile. You can call it democratic, or both,” Mills told ABC News. “This is a White House that is responding in real time to its coalition [which is] revolting to show it’s disgusted with the potential of war with Iran.”
At odds with Bannon’s viewpoint on Iran are other influential conservatives.
“Be all in, President Trump, in helping Israel eliminate the nuclear threat,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, told Fox News host Sean Hannity this week. “If we need to provide bombs to Israel, provide bombs. If we need to fly planes with Israel, do joint operations.”
According to one U.S. official, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth mostly ceded the discussion to military commanders, including Gen. Erik Kurilla, commander of military forces in the Mideast, and Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who have spent considerable time talking with Trump by phone and in person in recent weeks about his options with Iran and the risks involved, which can be extraordinarily complicated.
“Anybody will tell you the biggest threat to the region is a nuclear-armed Iran,” the official said. “No one wants Iran to have a nuke.”
Sean Parnell, chief Pentagon spokesperson, pushed back on the suggestion Hegseth hasn’t taken a lead role in the talks, calling it “completely false.” He said Hegseth speaks with Trump “multiple times a day each day,” and attended meetings with the president in the Situation Room.
“Secretary Hegseth is providing the leadership the Department of Defense and our Armed Forces need, and he will continue to work diligently in support of President Trump’s peace through strength agenda,” Parnell said.
Sources say Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also the president’s interim national security adviser, has been another constant presence at the president’s side during the discussions along with Trump’s Mideast adviser Steve Witkoff.
Once seen as one of Trump’s most hawkish cabinet members, Rubio espoused a hardline stance on Iran for years and warned last month that the country was now “a threshold nuclear weapons state.”
But since then, sources say, Rubio has become much more closely aligned with MAGA’s “America First,” noninterventionist stance, adding that he is acutely aware of the political repercussions that a direct attack on Iran could bring about.
U.S. and Israeli intelligence agree that Iran has been enriching uranium to a dangerously high concentration and could quickly amass enough of it to build several nuclear weapons.
But U.S. intelligence also cautions that its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, hasn’t given the order to build those devices. The question now is how soon Iran could declare itself a nuclear power after that decision was made.
The uncertainty has drawn comparisons in MAGA circles to faulty intelligence in Iraq, which supporters of the movement blame for the lengthy war.
Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, who has warned on social media of “warmongers,” told Congress this spring that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.” When asked Friday about that assessment, Trump responded that the intelligence community “is wrong” and “she’s wrong.” Gabbard later said her testimony was being taken out of context.
“America has intelligence that Iran is at the point that it can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks to months, if they decide to finalize the assembly. President Trump has been clear that can’t happen, and I agree,” she wrote in a post on Friday.
Sources say another factor could have played a role in Trump’s decision to hold off on striking Iran for now despite his insistence that Iran was close to a nuclear bomb. A third aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford and its guided-missile destroyers are set to deploy early next week to head toward Europe, according to the Navy.
The carrier strike group needs time to travel before it could be in a position to help protect troops in theater should Trump opt to move ahead with the strike two weeks from now.
Officials caution that any success Bannon might have in pulling the president back from the brink of war could be brief. When asked on Friday by reporters if he would ask Israel to stop bombing Iran to enable diplomatic negotiations, Trump said probably not.
“If someone is winning, it’s a little bit harder to do than if someone is losing,” Trump said of the Israelis.
“But we’re ready, willing and able and have been speaking to Iran and we’ll see what happens. We’ll see what happens.”
ABC News’ Beatrice Peterson contributed to this report.
Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to reflect that Thursday’s meeting took place in the Oval Office, not the Situation Room.
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump announced he will nominate Emil Bove, his former personal lawyer-turned-controversial top Department of Justice official, to serve as a federal appeals court judge on Wednesday.
“It is my great honor to nominate Emil Bove to serve as a Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Emil is a distinguished graduate of Georgetown Law, and served as Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York for nearly a decade, where he was the Co-Chief of the Terrorism and International Narcotics Unit.
“Emil is SMART, TOUGH, and respected by everyone,” he added. “He will end the Weaponization of Justice, restore the Rule of Law, and do anything else that is necessary to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. Emil Bove will never let you down!”
Bove is known for his purge of career law enforcement officials across the DOJ and FBI prior to the arrivals of Senate-confirmed leaders, as well as his role in the DOJ’s decision to drop the criminal corruption prosecution of New York City Mayor Eric Adams.
He will be nominated to serve on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over district courts in Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Bove’s nomination means some of his most controversial actions will be put under the spotlight in what could be a bruising confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Sources told ABC News that Republicans expect to schedule his confirmation hearing within the coming weeks.
Trump enlisted Bove to join his defense team in 2023 following his indictment for allegedly mishandling classified documents and obstructing justice by former special counsel Jack Smith. He also aided Trump’s defense team in his New York hush money prosecution, which resulted in Trump’s conviction of 34 felony counts.
Bove had served as a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York for roughly a decade and worked on several high-profile terrorism, espionage and narcotics cases, including the indictment of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
But Democrats will likely look to scrutinize the controversial early actions he took as the acting official leading the DOJ in Trump’s first months in office, when he took aggressive actions to shift law enforcement resources and personnel away from national security and public corruption investigations and toward immigration enforcement.
Bove also faced criticism and resistance from FBI leadership for his initiation of an investigation into hundreds of agents who assisted in the investigation of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, which resulted in a dramatic standoff with top career officials whom he accused of “insubordination” for initially withholding the agents’ names.
Bove’s role in dropping the criminal corruption case against Adams in exchange for his support on immigration enforcement also escalated into a crisis at both the DOJ and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan.
Multiple members of the trial team as well as top officials in the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section resigned after several alleged the arrangement, which would have dismissed the charges against Adams while leaving the potential they could be brought again if he resisted the administration’s demands, amounted to a blatant quid pro quo.
The judge overseeing Adams’ case ultimately dropped the case permanently while refusing the DOJ’s request to dismiss the charges “without prejudice” and issued a blistering assessment that described the department’s rationale as “both unprecedented and breathtaking in its sweep.”
“Everything here smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the Indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions,” Judge Dale Ho said in his ruling.
(WASHINGTON) — The U.S. military’s standards for investigating sexual assault claims will remain unchanged, a senior official told reporters on Thursday, as it launches a separate department-wide review into how discrimination claims are handled in general.
The promise also comes as the Defense Department faces a potential loss of personnel available to process sexual assault cases due to efforts by the Trump administration to trim staff across government.
“At the end of the day, the standard of proof remains the same with regard to any sexual harassment complaint,” said Dr. Nathan Galbreath, director of the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office.
“To that end, all complaints are reviewed, the evidence is analyzed, and a legal officer often opines on whether or not action can be taken,” Galbreath told reporters in a briefing call on tracking sexual assault cases in the military.
Last week, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called on service secretaries to review equal opportunity programs to ensure discrimination complaints weren’t being “weaponized” by disgruntled employees. The military tracks sexual harassment complaints through its equal opportunity personnel.
In his April 23 directive, Hegseth specifically called on secretaries to ensure “complaints that are unsubstantiated by actionable, credible evidence are timely dismissed.” He called it the “no more walking on eggshells policy.”
“Too often, at the Defense Department, there are complaints made that for certain reasons that can’t be verified that end people’s careers,” Hegseth said in a video posted on X.
“Some individuals use these programs in bad faith to retaliate against superiors or peers. I hear that all the time,” he said of general discrimination complaints.
When it comes to sexual assault, unfounded claims are extraordinarily rare. According to the military, 1% of cases involve evidence that either exonerates the person accused or shows the crime did not occur.
When asked if Hegseth’s latest mandate will raise the standard of proof for sexual assault victims, Galbreath said “no.”
President Donald Trump also asked the Pentagon to review regulations that are potentially burdensome and streamline operations, an effort that resulted in offers to employees for early retirement as well as hiring freezes across the department.
Galbreath and other officials told reporters Thursday that they aren’t sure exactly how the military’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response program will be affected just yet.
When a recent hiring freeze went into effect, there were about 300 sexual assault prevention jobs put on hold, said Dr. Andra Tharp, director of the Defense Department’s office of command climate and well-being integration.
“We’re really trying to get our arms around total impacts of that,” she said.
Tharp said she is encouraging the services to seek hiring exemptions for sexual assault response coordinators and victim advocates.
Galbreath said that 100% of victim services remain available now and that sexual assault response coordinators and victim advocates are stationed at every military installation around the world.
The number of sexual assaults reported across the military fell by nearly 4% last year, according to data released by the department.
The report is the first full-year account since the Pentagon put in place new prosecution procedures that empower independent lawyers, rather than military commanders. The changes were called for by lawmakers who said not enough was being done to encourage personnel to report assault.
“Even though we’d like to see the number of reports increase, I’m still very satisfied that our military members know that they can come forward,” and “get the help that they need to recover,” said Galbreath.
