KIROVOHRAD REGION, Ukraine: The mineral ilmenite is extracted from mounds of sand deep in the earth and refined using a method that summons the force of gravity, resulting in a substance that glimmers like a moonlit sky.
Ukraine boasts vast reserves of ilmenite — a key element used to produce titanium — in the heavy mineral sands that stretch for miles along the country’s embattled east.
Much of it, as with all of Ukraine’s critical minerals industry, is underdeveloped because of war as well as onerous state policies.
That is poised to change if US President Donald Trump’s administration agrees to a deal with Ukraine to exchange critical minerals for continued American military aid.
In the central region of Kirovohrad, the ilmenite open-pit mine is a canyon of precious deposits that its owner is keen to develop with US companies. But many unknowns stand in the way of turning these riches into profit: cost, licensing terms and whether such a deal will be underpinned by security guarantees.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Saturday at the Munich Security Conference that he did not permit his ministers to sign a mineral resource agreement with the US because the current version is not “ready to protect us, our interests.”
Ukrainian businessmen with knowledge of the minerals industry also privately expressed skepticism about whether a deal is viable. The capital-intensive industry is unlikely to yield results in years, if not decades, as geological data is either limited or classified. Many question what conditions American companies are willing to risk to build up the industry and whether existing Ukrainian policies that have so far deterred local businessmen will accommodate foreign investors.
“The main thing we can gain is certain security guarantees obtained through economic means, so that someone stronger than us has an interest in protecting us,” said Andriy Brodsky, CEO of Velta, a leading titanium mining company in Ukraine.
The question of security guarantees
A deal, which would essentially barter one resource for another, could help strengthen Kyiv’s relationship with the Trump administration.
The United States is a major consumer of critical raw earth minerals such as lithium and gallium, two elements that Ukraine has in proven reserves. Trump has specifically mentioned rare earth elements, but these are not well researched, industry experts told The Associated Press.
Titanium, used in aerospace, defense and industry, is also high in demand and the US is a leading importer of ilmenite. Sourcing the minerals from Ukraine would reduce future reliance on Russia and China.
In exchange, Kyiv would continue to receive a steady stream of American weaponry that offers leverage against Moscow and without which Ukraine cannot ward off future Russian aggression in the event of a ceasefire.
The question of security guarantees is a sticking point for companies, Ukrainian businessmen and analysts said. A senior Ukrainian official, speaking anonymously to describe private conversations, told the AP that US companies expressed interest in investing but needed to ensure their billions will be safeguarded in the event of renewed conflict. But once invested in Ukraine, the presence of American business interests alone might act as a guarantee, Brodsky said.
“If this process starts, it will continue,” Brodsky said. “Once the investment figures exceed hundreds of billions, the Americans, a highly pragmatic people, will protect their profits earned on Ukrainian soil. They will defend their interests against Russia, China, Korea, Iran and anyone else. They will protect what they consider theirs.”
Growing American interest
Brodsky, who just returned from a trip to Washington and New York, said the conversation among US businesses is changing in Kyiv’s favor.
“A lot of people in very serious and wealthy offices are saying that now, we — our country and my company — are in the right place and doing exactly what needs to be done at this moment,” he said.
Velta has worked with American partners for many years. Brodsky has begun negotiating with companies he believes could be a partner in the event of a deal.
Ukraine has never been attractive to foreign investors because of prohibitive government policies — not offering incentives to attract foreigners, for instance. Brodsky believes that international companies will need to pair up with local partners to flourish.
American companies have several ways to enter the market, explained Ksenia Orynchak, director of the National Association of Extractive Industries of Ukraine, but would require traversing “certain circles of hell” in Ukraine’s bureaucracy. Teaming up with an existing Ukrainian license owner is possibly the most straightforward.
She said more exploration is needed in the field and hinted existing data may have been acquired through ulterior motives. Under the Soviet system, geologists stood to gain if they claimed to have found large reserves.
“Someone did it so that Moscow would praise Ukrainian geologists or Soviet geologists,” she said.
She advises American investors to lower existing thresholds for exploration because bidding can take place in areas where reserves are only presumed, not proven.
“I believe, and so does the expert community, that this is not right. In fact, we are selling a pig in a poke,” she said.
A historically untapped sector
At the extraction site, the air is dense with ilmenite dust. When the afternoon sun’s rays pierce the darkened space, they sparkle and dance in the air. The soot covers the faces of workers who spend hours inside every day extracting the precious material from sand.
The gravity separation method removes unwanted elements in the ore and water separated from the mineral rains down through metal-lined floors. Workers are used to getting wet and don’t bat an eye. Titanium is developed from the purified ilmenite at a different facility.
Velta began in the form of an expired license for geological exploration and a business plan for $7 million when Brodsky acquired the company. It would be eight years and many millions more invested before he could even think about production capacity.
The deal also does not factor in a crucial element that could prove challenging later: The position of Ukrainian people themselves. According to the Constitution, the subsoil where extraction would take place belongs to Ukraine.
“I am very afraid that they (Ukrainian people) already had disapproving reviews, that everything is being given away. Who allowed him? He had no right? And so on,” Orynchak said.
Those sensitivities were echoed among workers at the Velta mine. Speaking anonymously to voice his true thoughts, one said: “If you have a vegetable garden in your home, do you invite a foreigner to take it?”
The high risk often is a key reason that some Ukrainian businessmen privately express skepticism about the deal.
When one businessman of a major group of companies heard about the arms-for-minerals deal, his first impression was: “This is just hot air,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity to speak freely about his thoughts. “This is a very capital intensive industry. Just to take ground from an open pit will cost you billions. Not millions, billions.”
In Ukraine, a potential arms-for-minerals deal inspires hope and skepticism
https://arab.news/z7c25
In Ukraine, a potential arms-for-minerals deal inspires hope and skepticism

- Ukraine has vast reserves of ilmenite — a key element used to produce titanium — along the country’s embattled east
- Much of it, as with all of Ukraine’s critical minerals industry, is underdeveloped because of war as well as onerous state policies
Arrests follow mass protests in defiance of Turkiye’s Erdogan

- Imamoglu was to appear before prosecutors Saturday in graft and terror probes
- The 53-year-old Istanbul mayor was arrested just days before the CHP was to name him their candidate for the 2028 presidential race
ISTANBUL: After his third night in custody, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu was to appear before prosecutors Saturday, just hours after hundreds of thousands hit the streets across Turkiye in a massive show of defiance.
It was the third straight night that protesters had rallied against the arrest of Imamoglu — the biggest political rival of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose arrest early Wednesday sparked Turkiye’s biggest street protests in more than a decade.
After an evening of clashes in Istanbul, Ankara and the western city of Izmir between protesters and riot police, who fired tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannon to disperse them, the security forces arrested 97 people, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said.
And media reports said police had raided scores of homes overnight, although there was no immediate confirmation of the number detained.
The 53-year-old mayor, who was arrested just days before the CHP was to name him their candidate for the 2028 presidential race, was speaking to police on Saturday morning in connection with the “terror” probe, party sources told AFP.
He was then expected to appear before prosecutors at Caglayan courthouse at 1800 GMT to be questioned in both the graft and the terror probes, they said.
Already named in a growing list of legal probes, Imamoglu — who was resoundingly re-elected last year — has been accused alongside six others of “aiding and abetting a terrorist organization” — namely the banned Kurdish militant group PKK.
He is also under investigation for “bribery, extortion, corruption, aggravated fraud, and illegally obtaining personal data for profit as part of a criminal organization” along with 99 other suspects.
He was questioned by police for six hours Friday about the graft allegations, the party said.
“Mr Imamoglu denies all the charges against him,” one of his lawyers, Mehmet Pehlivan said.
“The detention was aimed at undermining Mr.Imamoglu’s reputation in the eyes of society,” he wrote on X early on Saturday, saying both probes were “based on untrue allegations” and “a violation of the right to a fair trial.”
Demonstrators across the country were due to rally again on Saturday night.
In a message on X sent via his lawyers, Imamoglu said he was “honored and proud” of the demonstrators who hit the streets in more than 50 of Turkiye’s 81 provinces, saying they were “protecting our republic, our democracy, the future of a just Turkiye, and the will of our nation.”
Addressing the crowds outside City Hall in Istanbul on Friday night, Ozgur Ozel, who heads the main opposition CHP, said 300,000 people had joined the demonstration in defiance of a protest ban and a sharp warning from Erdogan that Turkiye would not tolerate “street terror.”
As he spoke, the crowd cheered and applauded, waving flags and banners and chanting slogans like: “Don’t stay silent or it will be you next.”
The move against Imamoglu has hurt the Turkish lira and financial markets, with the stock exchange’s BIST 100 index closing down nearly eight percent on Friday.
Last of six foreign hikers missing in Philippines rescued

- Four foreign hikers who had been missing for days in a mountainous area of the central Philippines were rescued Saturday, local authorities said, a day after their two companions were found safe
MANILA: Four foreign hikers who had been missing for days in a mountainous area of the central Philippines were rescued Saturday, local authorities said, a day after their two companions were found safe.
The six-man group, which included German, British, Russian and Canadian nationals, had set out on Wednesday for what was to be a four-hour excursion in an area of Negros Oriental province officials said was hit by a downpour.
“The army rescuers found them in the vicinity of the Silab hydropower plant,” said Jose Lawrence Silorio, a rescue official in the municipality of Amlan, near the province’s Balinsasayao Twin Lakes Natural Park.
Police identified the men as Germans Aldwin Fink, 60, and Wolfgang Schlenker, 67; Russian Anton Chernov, 38; and 50-year-old Canadian Terry De Gunten.
Philippine Army personnel found the hikers in a mountainous area thick with vegetation, said investigator Leo Gil Villafranca.
“They told the army they got lost due to the fog,” he said, adding all the hikers were residents of the province.
The four were discovered at 9:44 am (0144 GMT), according to local authorities.
“Overall, they are OK, but they had minor abrasions. We wrapped one of them in a blanket because he was feeling cold. But he was eventually able to stand up on his own,” Silorio said.
“They told us they survived by eating edible plants in the forest,” he added.
Silorio said the group was found about 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) from where fellow hikers Torsten Martin Groschupp, 58, and Alexander Radvanyi, 63, were discovered Friday morning.
An image posted to a police Facebook page showed De Gunten, his legs bloodied, talking to rescuers inside an ambulance while Chernov lay on a stretcher wrapped in a blanket.
Police said Friday that the weather had likely played a role in the group’s becoming lost on what they said was a “difficult” trail in a mountainous area the men were tackling without a guide.
“It was rainy at the time and that led to zero visibility,” said Valencia police officer Henry Japay, adding there was no cell phone reception in the area.
“There’s a big possibility that they stopped and took shelter when it started raining.”
US revokes legal status for 500,000 immigrants

- Trump has pledged to carry out the largest deportation campaign in US history and curb immigration, mainly from Latin American nations
WASHINGTON: The United States said Friday it was terminating the legal status of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, giving them weeks to leave the country.
President Donald Trump has pledged to carry out the largest deportation campaign in US history and curb immigration, mainly from Latin American nations.
The order affects around 532,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who came to the United States under a scheme launched in October 2022 by Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden and expanded in January the following year.
They will lose their legal protection 30 days after the Department of Homeland Security’s order is published in the Federal Register, which is scheduled Tuesday.
That means immigrants sponsored by the program “must depart the United States” by April 24 unless they have secured another immigration status allowing them to remain in the country, the order says.
Welcome.US, which supports people seeking refuge in the United States, urged those affected by the move to “immediately” seek advice from an immigration lawyer.
The Processes for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV) program, announced in January 2023, allowed entry to the United States for two years for up to 30,000 migrants per month from the four countries, which have grim human rights records.
Biden touted the plan as a “safe and humane” way to ease pressure on the crowded US-Mexico border.
But the Department of Homeland Security stressed Friday that the scheme was “temporary.”
“Parole is inherently temporary, and parole alone is not an underlying basis for obtaining any immigration status, nor does it constitute an admission to the United States,” it said in the order.
Nicolette Glazer, an immigration lawyer in California, said the order would affect the “vast majority” of the half a million immigrants who entered the United States under the CHNV scheme.
“Only 75,000 affirmative asylum applications were filed, so the vast majority of the CHNV parolees will find themselves without status, work permits, and subject to removal,” she posted on X.
“The chaos will be unreal.”
Trump last weekend invoked rare wartime legislation to fly more than 200 alleged members of a Venezuelan gang to El Salvador, which has offered to imprison migrants and even US citizens at a discount.
More than seven million Venezuelans have fled their country over the last decade as the oil-rich country’s economy implodes under leftist leader Nicolas Maduro, a bugbear of Washington who has faced major sanctions.
Heathrow resumes operations as global airlines scramble after shutdown

- Flights began to resume late on Friday
- British Airways warns of ‘huge impact’ in coming days
LONDON: London’s Heathrow Airport resumed full operations on Saturday, a day after a fire knocked out its power supply and shut Europe’s busiest airport, causing global travel chaos.
The travel industry was scrambling to reroute passengers and fix battered airline schedules after the huge fire at an electrical substation serving the airport.
Some flights had resumed on Friday evening, but the shuttering of the world’s fifth-busiest airport for most of the day left tens of thousands searching for scarce hotel rooms and replacement seats while airlines tried to return jets and crew to bases.
Teams were working across the airport to support passengers affected by the outage, a Heathrow spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
“We have hundreds of additional colleagues on hand in our terminals and we have added flights to today’s schedule to facilitate an extra 10,000 passengers traveling through the airport,” the spokesperson said.
The travel industry, facing the prospect of a financial hit costing tens of millions of pounds and a likely fight over who should pay, questioned how such crucial infrastructure could fail without backup.
“It is a clear planning failure by the airport,” said Willie Walsh, head of global airlines body IATA, who, as former head of British Airways, has for years been a fierce critic of the crowded hub.
The airport had been due to handle 1,351 flights on Friday, flying up to 291,000 passengers, but planes were diverted to other airports in Britain and across Europe, while many long-haul flights returned to their point of departure.
Heathrow Chief Executive Thomas Woldbye said he expected the airport to be back “in full operation” on Saturday.
Asked who would pay for the disruption, he said there were “procedures in place,” adding “we don’t have liabilities in place for incidents like this.”
Restrictions on overnight flights were temporarily lifted by Britain’s Department of Transport to ease congestion, but British Airways chief executive Sean Doyle said the closure was set to have a “huge impact on all of our customers flying with us over the coming days.”
Virgin Atlantic said it expected to operate “a near full schedule” with limited cancelations on Saturday but that the situation remained dynamic and all flights would be kept under continuous review.
Airlines including JetBlue, American Airlines, Air Canada, Air India, Delta Air Lines, Qantas, United Airlines, British Airways and Virgin were diverted or returned to their origin airports in the wake of the closure, according to data from flight analytics firm Cirium.
Shares in many airlines fell on Friday.
Aviation experts said the last time European airports experienced disruption on such a large scale was the 2010 Icelandic volcanic ash cloud that grounded some 100,000 flights.
They warned that some passengers forced to land in Europe may have to stay in transit lounges if they lack the paperwork to leave the airport.
Prices at hotels around Heathrow jumped, with booking sites offering rooms for 500 pounds ($645), roughly five times the normal price levels.
Police said after an initial assessment, they were not treating the incident at the power substation as suspicious, although enquiries remained ongoing. London Fire Brigade said its investigations would focus on the electrical distribution equipment.
Heathrow and London’s other major airports have been hit by other outages in recent years, most recently by an automated gate failure and an air traffic system meltdown, both in 2023.
UNICEF calls on the Taliban to lift ban on girls’ education as new school year begins in Afghanistan
UNICEF calls on the Taliban to lift ban on girls’ education as new school year begins in Afghanistan

- Afghanistan is the only country in the world that bans female secondary and higher education, with Taliban justifying ban
- The ban has deprived 400,000 more girls of their right to education, bringing the total to 2.2 million, the UN agency says
ISLAMABAD: The UN children’s agency on Saturday urged Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers to immediately lift a lingering ban on girls’ education to save the future of millions who have been deprived of their right to education since the Taliban returned to power in 2021.
The appeal by UNICEF comes as a new school year began in Afghanistan without girls beyond sixth grade. The ban, said the agency, has deprived 400,000 more girls of their right to education, bringing the total to 2.2 million.
Afghanistan is the only country in the world that bans female secondary and higher education, with the Taliban justifying the ban saying it doesn’t comply with their interpretation of Sharia, or Islamic law.
“For over three years, the rights of girls in Afghanistan have been violated,” Catherine Russell, UNICEF executive director, said in a statement. “All girls must be allowed to return to school now. If these capable, bright young girls continue to be denied an education, then the repercussions will last for generations.”
A ban on the education of girls will harm the future of millions of Afghan girls, she said, adding that if the ban persists until 2030, “more than four million girls will have been deprived of their right to education beyond primary school.” The consequences, she added, will be “catastrophic.”
Russell warned that the decline in female doctors and midwives will leave women and girls without crucial medical care. This situation is projected to result in an estimated 1,600 additional maternal deaths and over 3,500 infant deaths. “These are not just numbers, they represent lives lost and families shattered,” she said.
The Afghan Taliban government earlier this year skipped a Pakistan-hosted global conference where Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai condemned the state of women’s and girl’s rights in Afghanistan as gender apartheid.