World
Trump Ties Himself to Future of Ukraine With Minerals Deal
The minerals deal signed by the United States and Ukraine on Wednesday could bring untold money into a joint investment fund between the two countries that would help rebuild Ukraine whenever the war with Russia ends.
But Ukraine’s untapped resources that are the subject of the deal will take years to extract and yield profits. And those could fail to deliver the kind of wealth that President Trump has long said they would.
It is not yet clear how the nine-page deal, the text of which Ukraine’s government made public on Thursday, will work in practice. Many specifics need to be worked out, but the deal will set up an investment fund, jointly managed by Kyiv and Washington.
Although the Trump administration had wanted Kyiv to use its mineral wealth to repay past U.S. military assistance, the final text removes the idea of treating that aid as debt. The deal also seemed to specifically keep the door open for Ukraine to eventually join the European Union, a move that neither the United States nor Russia has opposed.
There was no mention of a security guarantee — which Ukraine had long sought to prevent Russia from regrouping after any cease-fire. But the deal does mean that the United States could send more military aid to Ukraine if a peace deal is not reached.
The much-anticipated signing of the agreement has almost certainly accomplished one thing that seemed almost impossible two months ago: It has tied Mr. Trump to Ukraine’s future.
“This agreement signals clearly to Russia that the Trump administration is committed to a peace process centered on a free, sovereign and prosperous Ukraine over the long term,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in announcing the agreement on Wednesday.
Analysts agreed on Thursday that the deal could guarantee Mr. Trump’s interest in Ukraine now that he is publicly invested.
“He’s a businessman — he always does the math,” said Volodymyr Fesenko, a leading political analyst in Kyiv. “His business mind-set shapes his approach to politics. So his motivation in the agreement could help maintain U.S. interest in Ukraine. How this will work out in practice, only time will tell.”
Ukraine’s Parliament still has to ratify the agreement, which will probably happen in the next 10 days, officials said on Thursday.
In the end, it appears that Ukraine managed to get some of what it wanted, but not everything. The notable omission was the absence of a security guarantee.
“The agreement has changed significantly,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in a social-media post on Thursday evening. He added, “Now it is a truly equal agreement that creates an opportunity for investments in Ukraine.”
The investment fund will be financed with revenues from new projects in critical minerals, oil and gas — and not from projects that are already operating. In theory, it would be a 50-50 partnership in which Ukraine and the United States each would put the same amount into the fund and run it equally.
Anna Skorokhod, a Ukrainian Parliament member from an opposition political party, said she was briefed about the deal at a government meeting on Thursday. Ms. Skorokhod said she was told the Americans would put money into the fund — and the equivalent dollar amount of what any future military aid to Ukraine would cost.
The Ukrainians will put money into the fund from mining licenses issued for investors and royalties from the mineral resources developed under the deal. Half of that money will go into the Ukrainian budget; half will go into the joint investment fund. Senior Ukrainian officials confirmed that understanding.
Ms. Skorokhod said she was hesitant to support the deal because it lacked specifics. “It looks good, but we don’t know if it’s true or it’s a fairy tale for us to vote,” she said.
The fund would be established by both governments and managed by a limited-liability company formed in Delaware and run by three Ukrainians and three Americans, Ms. Skorokhod said. Profits would go to rebuild Ukraine after the war for the first 10 years; after that, it’s not clear what would happen with the profits.
The final terms will be detailed in future agreements.
The signing of the deal on Mr. Trump’s 100th day in office was the latest twist in his ever-shifting approach to the war, which Russia started with its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Mr. Trump has falsely blamed Kyiv for instigating the war and seemed to find more of a kinship with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia than with anyone in Ukraine. He has repeatedly questioned why the United States became Kyiv’s biggest ally under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. And he has made no secret of his irritation with Mr. Zelensky and Kyiv’s requests for more military assistance.
The nadir of the relationship between Ukraine and the United States came on Feb. 28, when Mr. Zelensky and Mr. Trump were initially expected to sign a profit-sharing minerals deal in the Oval Office. The meeting was a disaster. Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance publicly castigated Mr. Zelensky, who was abruptly asked to leave the White House. In the fallout, the Trump administration temporarily suspended military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine.
But Mr. Trump has also repeatedly said he wants to end the war, even campaigning on the promise he would do so in 24 hours. He has since said he was not being literal.
As the Trump administration has pressured both Russia and Ukraine to agree to a peace deal — or at the least, a 30-day cease-fire — Ukraine has tried to look like the reasonable party. Mr. Zelensky, who has worked to smooth relations with the Trump administration after the Oval Office debacle, immediately agreed to the idea of an unconditional 30-day truce; Mr. Putin did not.
Still, for Ukraine, the minerals deal offered an opportunity for some leverage, even as critics described it as extortion.
The Ukrainian government initially highlighted the country’s mineral holdings to the Trump administration, hoping to draw some investment and to help solidify the relationship between the two countries.
Ukrainian officials say the country holds deposits of more than 20 critical minerals; one consulting firm valued them at several trillion dollars. But the minerals may not be easy to extract, and the Soviet-era maps identifying the locations of the critical deposits have never been modernized nor necessarily thoroughly vetted.
Kyiv had desperately wanted the deal to include some kind of security guarantee from the United States. Without one, officials feared, Russia could violate any cease-fire — which Moscow has done before.
Mr. Trump, though, has said that having a joint investment fund with the United States would be a security guarantee in its own right — that if U.S. companies and the U.S. government were invested in Ukraine’s future, that alone will deter Russia.
In many ways, despite all the back-and-forth, the deal signed on Wednesday with little fanfare resembled the one that fell apart in February.
Reaction to the deal was mixed in Ukraine on Thursday.
Vira Zhdan, 36, who lives in the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia, which frequently comes under Russian attack, said the deal could unfairly siphon off money from Ukrainian resources to U.S. investors.
“These are snares that tighten around us and drag our country into a deeper and deeper pit,” she said. “We live here and now, but it will be our descendants who have to deal with the consequences. This will, undoubtedly, leave a significant mark on them.”
But Svitlana Mahmudova-Bardadyn, 46, who lives in the Sumy region near the border with Russia, said she hoped the deal meant Ukraine would receive more U.S. support — like weapons. She also said she hoped “that this full-scale war will finally end, that things will get better for us.”
That all remained to be seen on Thursday, with the text of the agreement vague and Ukrainian officials staying mum on any promises that might have been made.
Instead, the deal’s language referred to “an expression of a broader, long-term strategic alignment” between the two countries, “a tangible demonstration of the United States of America’s support” for Ukraine’s security and reconstruction. And it made it clear who would not stand to gain.
The agreement says the United States and Ukraine want to ensure that countries “that have acted adversely to Ukraine in the conflict do not benefit from the reconstruction of Ukraine” once peace is reached — in other words, Russia.
Oleksandra Mykolyshyn contributed reporting.
World
AI helped a musician with Parkinson’s finish his new album when he could no longer play guitar
LONDON (AP) — Samuel Smith spent years writing songs with a guitar in his hands.
Now, the London-based singer-songwriter is using artificial intelligence tools to help him continue making Americana music after Parkinson’s disease largely took away his ability to play guitar.
Smith, who was diagnosed with the progressive neurological disorder in 2020, recently released his second album, “The Art of Letting Go.” For one of the eight tracks, an instrumental piece titled “Horizon,” he relied on platforms that use AI to generate music to create demo arrangements that would convey his vision to the musicians who recorded the song.
The demos he created by humming rough melodies into his phone and uploading the recordings into song generators like Suno and Udio weren’t for mixing into the final studio version of “Horizon,” Smith stressed. But tremors, stiffness and fatigue, which are common symptoms of Parkinson’s, caused his guitar skills to deteriorate during the more than a year he worked on the album, he said.
“So then I’m faced with a question,” Smith, 49, said. “‘Don’t play, don’t be creative, or find a way out, find a route.’ And for me, this was the route.”
Generative AI has divided the music industry, whose artists and record labels have complained of their copyrighted work being used to train the models behind AI-powered music tools. Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Records sued Suno and Udio in June 2024, although Universal later reached a settlement and partnership deal with Udio and Warner did the same with Suno.
Less discussed is what those platforms can do when employed by a serious musician like Smith, whose disease affects the tools central to his songwriting and identity as a guitarist: his hands. He released his debut album, “In the Springtime,” in 2023, saying he wanted to give his two sons a way to remember when he could perform and record music himself.
“I’d always written, I’d also played, I always sung,” he said. “And immediately it became clear to me that I was in trouble, that my music was going to be seriously compromised.”
From prompts to convincing demos
AI music generators use systems trained on large datasets of recorded music and audio. The platforms analyze patterns in melody, harmony, and rhythm before generating new audio based on prompts or uploaded recordings. Users don’t need musical talent to end up with a serviceable song, or even a popular one.
Smith said producing convincing demos from the synthetic tracks the apps generated often required “50, 100, 150 attempts” and extensive editing “to get something that sounds close to my music.” After humming a song into his phone and uploading the recording, he gives prompts describing instrumentation, mood and style. .
“AI is not replacing anything for me,” he said. “It’s unlocking, it’s enabling. It’s allowing me to keep writing. I upload my lyrics; AI doesn’t create my lyrics. I upload my music; AI does not create my music.”
He added: “It then brings it to life in a way that I can play to session players and say, ‘Here, that’s what I’m thinking, that is what I’m hearing.’”
A bittersweet guitar duet
The album was produced by Grammy-winning pianist and producer Matt Rollings, who assembled a group of established roots and bluegrass musicians for the project. They included dobro player and 16-time Grammy winner Jerry Douglas, Grammy-winning banjo player Alison Brown, fiddler Stuart Duncan, guitarist Bryan Sutton, bassist Viktor Krauss and singers Jonatha Brooke and Glen Phillips.
For Smith, the experience of singing in a Nashville studio alongside musicians he had admired for decades was “an extraordinary moment.”
Grammy-nominated guitarist Julian Lage, known for his jazz and acoustic recordings with Blue Note Records, performed on the album’s title track and on “Horizon.” The latter recording became a bittersweet high point in Smith’s career; despite the progression of his disease, he managed to play a guitar duet with his friend.
“I hadn’t been able to play for months, but I kept telling myself that if I wrote something to take to the studio, perhaps the clouds would part for a few minutes,” Smith said. “That’s what happened. I had a window of about 10 minutes in the studio when my arm freed up. … So in the end, I was able to capture the last breath of my guitar playing.”
New possibilities and perils
Experts said AI-assisted music tools could benefit other people with disabilities or illnesses.
Ruaidhri Mannion, a composer, music producer and sonic artist who teaches at Brunel University of London, said technology like affordable digital recording software “effectively democratized the making of music” in recent decades. By helping songwriters and musicians communicate ideas and collaborate more easily, AI tools that generate polished-sounding material from voice or text prompts could work in the same way, he said.
“If these tools are able to enable people to be able to participate with other creative groups and encourage more people to feel confident to be able to reach out to an ensemble or an orchestra or something, then I think that is all for the better,” Mannion said.
But an overreliance on technology could intefere with the trial and error, frustration and synergy that are necessary parts of a musician’s artistic development, Mannion said.
“What makes a lot of music-making meaningful is the collaborative element,” he said. “There’s a lot of experimentation and development and failure that’s part of musical discovery.”
Udio and Suno have denied copyright infringement allegations and said they wanted to work with the music industry, not in opposition to it. Some musicians are unconvinced. A group of recording artists and activists, including singer-songwriter Tift Merritt, David Lowery of the bands Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven, and ECR Music Group President Blake Morgan, published an open letter in February under the heading “So no to Suno.”
“Many in our community are embracing responsible AI as a tool for creation, and as a means for fans to explore and interact with our artistry. That’s wonderful,” the letter read. “But it’s not the same as creating an environment where AI-generated works sourced from our music are mass distributed to dilute our royalties or, worse yet, reward those actively seeking to commit fraud. Artists need to know the difference.”
‘Show us what you can do’
Smith said he thinks his experience demonstrated how AI could benefit society and expand creative access, if it’s developed responsibly.
“My message would be that if these companies want to show they’ve got a place, a role in society, then step up,” Smith said. “Engage with health professionals, engage with music therapists, engage with society and show us what you can do.”
On May 21, Smith collaborated with the Berklee Music and Health Institute for an event in New York that brought together music industry leaders, researchers and clinicians to examine how music can support people living with neurological conditions. Smith discussed his experience living with Parkinson’s and sang again alongside musicians who played on “The Art of Letting Go.”
Creating music is crucial to the legacy Smith hopes to leave for his children, ages 4 and 17.
“My 4-year-old is probably never going to remember me playing, and it’s heartbreaking,” he said. “But I’ve been able to pull this into something and refuse to be defined by this disease.”
World
Christian farming communities under siege as US report names Fulani militants Nigeria’s deadliest threat
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JOHANNESBURG — An estimated 30,000 mostly Muslim Fulani militants are operating in Nigeria, causing “worsening insecurity and religious freedom violations,” according to an influential new report.
The report, by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), states “violence by Fulani militants caused the highest number of deaths among all religious communities in Nigeria over the last year, as compared to attacks by organized insurgent groups and criminal gangs.”
The Fulanis, so-called herders of livestock, have, according to the USCIRF report, “targeted Christian (farming) communities in the Middle Belt and, increasingly, the South, burning homes and churches as well as kidnapping, raping, and murdering.”
CHRISTIANS TARGETED IN SYSTEMATIC KIDNAPPING CAMPAIGN IN NIGERIA BY JIHADI HERDSMEN, EXPERTS SAY
Funerals were held for about 27 Christians reportedly killed by Islamist Fulani tribesmen in Bindi village, Plateau State, Nigeria, on July 28, 2025. (Christian Solidarity International)
But a former counterterrorism expert at the State Department told Fox News Digital that the kind of strikes the U.S., working with Nigerian government forces, have recently carried out in Nigeria’s North against Islamist terrorist organizations such as Boko Haram and Islamic State, wouldn’t work against the Fulanis in the predominantly Christian central areas of the country.
Sterling Tilley, former acting director within the Bureau of Counterterrorism, who has worked in Nigeria for the State Department, said that the U.S. “militarily dealing with the farmer-herder conflict is not advisable because it is likely to bring more instability in the country.” Tilley, now director of the Thomas R. Pickering Graduate Foreign Affairs Fellowship at Howard University, added, “There are some steps that can be taken to quell the violence, but there must be Nigerian political will to do so.”
Young people protest against the killings following a deadly attack by Fulani militants on Christian-majority villages in Benue state, that left 218 people dead and 6,000 displaced. The protest took place in Benue state in June 2025. (Open Doors UK)
This week, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth commented on the recent strikes ordered by President Donald Trump on Nigeria, saying, “Maybe a year ago, [the president] heard the call of Nigerian Christians who were being targeted and killed by ISIS. And he said, ‘Pete, I want the War Department to focus on ensuring that we do everything we can to protect those Christians.’”
NIGERIA NAMED EPICENTER OF GLOBAL KILLINGS OF CHRISTIANS OVER FAITH IN 2025, REPORT SAYS
Christians make up approximately 48% of Nigeria’s population. Fulani militants, the USCIRF report stated, “have often carried out operations during Christian holidays such as Christmas or Easter to further maximize the psychological impact, terrifying those communities from gathering to celebrate or worship. During attacks, assailants sometimes utter slogans with religious connotations, such as “Allahu Akbar“ (Arabic for “God is great”).
But, according to the report, Muslims are being attacked too. “Fulani assailants have not spared Muslims, raiding herders’ cattle and violently attacking non-Fulani Muslim communities,” the report added.
Coffins arrive at Ibrahim Babanginda Square in Makurdi, Benue State, on Jan. 11, 2018, during a funeral service for victims of clashes between Fulani herdsmen and natives of Guma and Logo districts. (Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP)
“Violence at the hands of militants from the Fulani tribe far outnumbers violence from all other militant groups such as Boko Haram or ISWAP (Islamic State West African Province),” Henrietta Blyth, CEO of Open Doors UK & Ireland, an organization that highlights the persecution of Christians, told Fox News Digital.
While her organization was not part of the report, she said, “My heart has been broken as I have heard stories from women and men who have seen their beloved family members butchered in front of them or carried off into a life of slavery.”
AFRICAN UNION CHIEF DENIES GENOCIDE CLAIMS AGAINST CHRISTIANS AS CRUZ WARNS NIGERIAN OFFICIALS
Fulani Muslim men pray in Masallacin Shehu Mosque, Sokoto, Sokoto State, Nigeria, on April 24, 2019. (Luis Tato/AFP via Getty Images)
Blyth added: “The situation is complicated, and as the report concludes, it is too simplistic to say all perpetrators are religiously motivated. What is undisputable is that Christians are highly vulnerable and often the victims, paying the price in blood. They desperately need protection and, for hundreds of thousands driven from their homes, the chance to heal and rebuild their lives.”
The USCIRF report also stated, “Criticism of responses to Fulani militant violence from federal and state authorities has often described their responses as unsatisfactory at best and complicit at worst.”
Tilley told Fox News Digital that elections are to be held in Nigeria next year, and “the Fulani do have considerable political influence as a voting bloc. Thus, the Nigerian government seems reluctant to take actions necessary to quell the violence for fear that they could lose their base of support in the North and Middle Belt.”
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Fox News Digital reached out to the Nigerian government for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.
Published on
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has warned that Russia may be preparing to launch a “massive” new attack against Ukraine.
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“We have intel indicating that Russia is preparing a new massive attack,” Zelenskyy said in a post on social media late on Friday, while also advising people to listen out for air raid alerts and keep safe.
“The air force and protectors of our skies will be working around the clock, as always,” he added.
It comes after Russia deployed its nuclear-capable Oreshnik missile in a massive wave of strikes on the Kyiv region last weekend. Ukraine said the attack included 90 missiles and 600 drones.
The use of the Oreshnik, an intermediate-range ballistic missile that Russia first used in a strike on Dnipro in 2024, drew strong criticism from leaders across Europe.
On Friday, Zelenskyy also reiterated his call for more Patriot missile systems from the US. The Patriot is an air and missile defense system used to intercept ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, drones, and aircraft.
Zelenskyy told reporters in Sweden on Thursday that he was being “very persistent” in his pursuit of new missiles for the system. He reportedly wrote to US President Donald Trump earlier this week asking for more ammunition.
“For us — for a nation fighting for its survival — there is hardly anything more painful to see than Patriot batteries with no missiles loaded,” he said in his letter to Trump.
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