Click to view full size

Ukraine is ready to sign an agree­ment that would give the U.S. ac­cess to its valu­able rare min­er­als in the hopes of en­sur­ing con­tin­ued Amer­i­can sup­port for Kyiv in its grind­ing war with Rus­sia, se­nior Ukrain­ian of­fi­cials said Wednes­day.

Ukraine’s econ­o­my min­is­ter, Yu­lia Svyry­denko, was in Wash­ing­ton on Wednes­day to help sew up tech­ni­cal as­pects of the deal, ac­cord­ing to two se­nior Ukrain­ian of­fi­cials who spoke on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty be­cause they weren’t au­tho­rized to dis­cuss the mat­ter pub­licly.

For Ukraine, the deal is seen as key to en­sur­ing its ac­cess to fu­ture U.S. mil­i­tary aid.