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Af­ter months of tense ne­go­ti­a­tions, the U.S. and Ukraine signed a deal that is ex­pect­ed to give Wash­ing­ton ac­cess to the coun­try’s crit­i­cal min­er­als and oth­er nat­ur­al re­sources, an agree­ment Kyiv hopes will se­cure long-term sup­port for its de­fence against Rus­sia.

Ac­cord­ing to Ukrain­ian of­fi­cials, the ver­sion of the deal signed Wednes­day is far more ben­e­fi­cial to Ukraine than pre­vi­ous ver­sions, which they said re­duced Kyiv to a ju­nior part­ner and gave Wash­ing­ton un­prece­dent­ed rights to the coun­try’s re­sources.

The agree­ment — which the Ukrain­ian par­lia­ment must rat­i­fy — would es­tab­lish a re­con­struc­tion fund for Ukraine that Ukrain­ian of­fi­cials hope will be a ve­hi­cle to en­sure fu­ture Amer­i­can mil­i­tary as­sis­tance. A pre­vi­ous agree­ment was near­ly signed be­fore be­ing de­railed in a tense Oval Of­fice meet­ing in­volv­ing U.S. Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump, U.S. Vice Pres­i­dent JD Vance and Ukrain­ian Pres­i­dent Volodymyr Ze­len­skyy.