The US president wants Ukraine to return all of Washingtons aid back with interest, Hugh Tomlinson has said

President Donald Trump is both contemptuous of Ukraine's Vladimir Zelensky and assured of Kiev's weakness in its conflict with Moscow, The Times' Washington reporter Hugh Tomlinson suggested in an op-ed published on Friday.

In light of this, Trump is aiming to get back all the funds the US has spent on the Ukraine conflict during his predecessor Joe Biden's term, Tomlinson wrote.

"Convinced of Ukraine's weakness, contemptuous of Zelensky, and enraged by the billions of dollars in aid given to Kiev by Joe Biden's administration, Trump has set out to get it all back, and more," he said.

Last month, Trump demanded Kiev reimburse what he claimed was hundreds of billions of dollars in US aid via Ukraine's mineral wealth, originally focusing on "rare earths."

An earlier iteration of the deal was reportedly to be signed earlier in March, only to be derailed by Zelensky's public shouting match with the US president in the Oval Office. Following the altercation, Trump temporarily froze all military aid and intelligence sharing with Kiev.

However, the US reversed the decision after Ukraine agreed to a 30-day partial ceasefire following US-Ukrainian talks in Jeddah earlier this month. Moscow has since accused Ukraine of multiple strikes on its energy sites, which are off-limits under the truce.

After Monday's separate talks with the US in Saudi Arabia, both Russia and Ukraine have said they're willing to broaden the partial ceasefire to encompass a naval truce on the Black Sea.

"For days, White House officials have insisted that an agreement on the minerals deal was close. Now a possible reason for the delay and the price of a ceasefire may be becoming clearer," Tomlinson wrote, adding that "US negotiators have apparently been working to extract even greater concessions from Kiev."

The latest version of the minerals agreement proposed by the Trump administration is far harsher than earlier iterations, Reuters wrote on Thursday, citing a draft proposal.

According to it, the newest deal states that Washington will recoup all funds given to Ukraine since the escalation of its conflict with Russia in 2022, and charges a 4% annual interest rate on the sum before Kiev can access the fund's profits.

Zelensky has confirmed that he has received a fresh proposal from the US but insisted that the funding Kiev has received from Washington was a donation and not a loan.

The US has allocated more than $123 billion to Ukraine in military and financial aid since 2022, according to data from Germany's Kiel Institute. Trump maintains that Washington has spent more than $300 billion on supporting Kiev.

(RT.com)