PhilipTheBucket

The U.S. and Ukraine have signed a memorandum of understanding on a minerals deal that is yet to be finalized, Deputy Prime Minister and Economic Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko said on April 17.

U.S. and Ukrainian negotiators have made "significant progress" in talks on a minerals deal, which will be concluded in the "near future," Svyrydenko said a day earlier on April 16. Delegations from the two sides met in Washington on April 11 and 12 to work out details of the long-debated deal.

"Today, we took a step towards a joint Economic Partnership Agreement with the United States. Ukraine and the United States of America signed a memorandum, which demonstrates the constructive joint efforts of our teams and the intention to finalize and conclude an agreement that will be beneficial to both our peoples," Svyrydenko said.

Svyrydenko noted that work needs to be done to finalize the text of the minerals agreement, followed by the signing of the agreement, adding that, afterwards, the agreement needs to be ratified by the parliaments of both countries.

"We are preparing the creation of the Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund. The corresponding agreement will open up opportunities for significant investments, infrastructure modernization, and a mutually beneficial partnership between Ukraine and the United States — this is precisely the goal for which the teams are working on the document," Svyrydenko said.

The agreement has been in the works for several months and has been a point of contention between Ukraine and the U.S. President Volodymyr Zelensky and U.S. President Donald Trump got into a heated argument in the White House on Feb. 28 when the deal was set to be signed by the two leaders.

"It is important that we reaffirm through our agreements the desire of the American people to invest together with the Ukrainian people in a free, sovereign, and secure Ukraine," Svyrydenko said.

Trump told reporters on April 17 that Ukraine and the U.S. could sign a minerals deal on April 24.

"We have a minerals deal, which I guess is going to be signed on Thursday, next Thursday," Trump said during a press conference with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in the White House.

Trump wants to use the deal as a signal that the U.S. stands with Ukraine as an economic partner, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in an interview released on April 4, adding that it would incentivize Russia to negotiate an end to its war against Ukraine.

"The sequencing has been thrown off, but I think we can fix it," Bessent said, referring to the steps the U.S. plans to take in establishing a peace plan.

Andrii Yermak, Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha and Defence Minister Rustem Umierov have arrived in Paris to meet with leaders of the coalition of the willing and representatives of the United States.

Source: Yermak on Telegram

Quote: "I have just landed in Paris. We arrived together with Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha and Defence Minister Rustem Umierov.

As part of the visit, a series of bilateral and multilateral meetings are planned with representatives of the coalition states willing and able to guarantee security – in particular, from France, Germany and the UK."

Details: Yermak said that the agenda also includes a meeting with US representatives who are currently in France.

"We are working on important issues for the security of Ukraine and the whole of Europe," Yermak concluded.

Background:

Earlier, it was reported that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump’s Special Envoy Steve Witkoff would go to Paris this week for talks, which would include Ukraine.The coalition of the willing, led by France and the UK, is working on a plan to send a mission to Ukraine to guarantee a future ceasefire.On 4 April, the French and UK chiefs of defence visited Kyiv to meet with Ukraine's top leadership. The purpose of the visit was to discuss the needs and challenges of the Ukrainian forces with a view to providing long-term support.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has commented on the statement made by Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy for the Middle East, who said the key to a peace deal revolves around "five territories".

Source: Interfax-Ukraine, citing Zelenskyy’s remarks at a press conference with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in Odesa, as reported by European Pravda

Quote: "Ukraine is a sovereign state, and only the Ukrainian people can speak about its territories.

All territories belong to the unitary state of Ukraine. Once again – only the Ukrainian people can speak about our territories. And you know what our red lines are – we will never recognise any temporarily occupied territories as Russian.

Therefore, these individuals are discussing matters beyond their mandate."

Background:

Witkoff stated on Fox News that a peace deal would involve settling the issue of "so-called five territories", though he did not specify which ones. Previously, in a high-profile interview with Tucker Carlson, Witkoff claimed that the biggest issue in this conflict was the "so-called four regions", but then listed five: "Donbas, Crimea, Luhansk, and two more". Following these remarks, Reuters reported that some of Witkoff’s statements and actions regarding Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine have drawn criticism in the White House and among Republicans.

The Russian government is planning to open a political education workshop for youth that will be analogous to the Soviet-era Higher Komsomol School, which indoctrinated young Communist Party members, the Russian pro-state news agency RBK reported on April 15.

The Komsomol was a youth division (ages 14 to 28) of the Communist Party during the Soviet Union. The Higher Komsomol School trained future leaders, teachers, and party workers, offering degrees in "communist education."

Russia will launch a new program called the Digoria Political Education Workshop to train personnel who work with youth, a source in the Kremlin told RBK.

The source likened the program directly to the Higher Komsomol School.

"It will be its modern analog for young specialists in the socio-political sphere and youth policy administrators," he said.

Participants "will receive both ideological training and special knowledge on the management of youth organizations and participation in political processes."

Russia's state Youth Affairs Agency, Rosmolodezh, is expected to be the school's primary customer. By the end of the year, the school aims to conduct 12-13 educational programs for 100 people per course.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has previously drawn inspiration from the Soviet era when enacting modern-day Kremlin policy. In 2023, the government launched the state youth group Movement of the First, which Putin suggested naming the "Pioneers" — a callback to the Soviet-era organization for children.

Moscow's policy of "military and patriotic education" relies on schools, youth organizations, and camps to heavily militarize children, instilling loyalty among the younger generation towards Putin's expansionist ideology.

Donald Trump’s deepening partnership with El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, was on display as the two leaders rejected the idea of returning a man mistakenly deported by the U.S. and locked up in a Salvadoran mega-prison. Meeting at the White House, they indicated Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia would remain in Salvadoran custody despite a ruling by the Supreme Court instructing the Trump administration to take steps to return him to the U.S. Trump epeated his interest in sending American citizens convicted of violent crimes to Bukele’s prison in El Salvador and said his attorney general was studying the legal feasibility. Trump called Bukele “one hell of a president.”

Few media organizations have covered the rise of Bukele, as closely or fearlessly, as El Faro, founded in 1998 as the first digital newspaper in Latin America. In 2020, El Faro began publishing a blockbuster investigation that exposed secret negotiations between the Bukele administration and leaders of the MS-13 gang who were imprisoned in El Salvador. The goal was to reduce violence on the streets and win the gang’s support in mid-term elections in exchange for prison privileges. Some of the MS-13 leaders were eventually released as part of the deal, according to El Faro’s reporting. It was later discovered that during this period El Faro’s staff was the target of a massive cyber attack with Pegasus spyware. Experts suspected it was a state-sanctioned hack. The Pegasus attack on El Faro was featured in a Reveal episode in September, 2023.

In the run up to Bukele’s meeting with Donald Trump, Reveal host Al Letson spoke with El Faro director Carlos Dada about the emerging security alliance between the U.S. and El Salvador and the controversial deal to send deported U.S. migrants to the country’s notorious Terrorist Confinement Center (CECOT).

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Al Letson: So I want to start by asking you about this mega-prison, CECOT. It was built after the Bukele administration declared a state of emergency in 2022 to deal with violent gangs which were still controlling large parts of the country. The government suspended some civil liberties, including the right to due process. What are conditions like in that prison?

Carlos Dada: CECOT is a poster child of our prison system. It’s a high security prison, built allegedly to exclusively hold gang members. It has been heavily used by Bukele’s propaganda machine, producing, as you might have seen, highly professional videos in which every single image is meticulously taken care of. If you see something from that prison, it is because the regime wants you to see it. But that prison is only one of 32 in our system.

So some people have described CECOT as basically a black hole. Is that accurate?

I think it is a good description. No one can enter this prison. Relatives of the prisoners cannot visit them. They are not allowed to receive anything from outside. According to President Bukele, they don’t see the light of the sun ever.

It sounds like from your reporting, the director of El Salvador’s prison system, Osiris Luna, is somewhat notorious.

Osiris Luna was sanctioned by the U.S. State Department and also by the Treasury Department for corruption and for allowing the secret agreement with the gangs to take place. We have published several stories about Mr. Osiris Luna’s use of prison resources, including prisoners for his private benefit. Even El Salvador’s police intelligence unit has described him as an important piece of a criminal organization that distributes drugs. His administration of the prison system has brought back systematic torture to our prisons, something we thought was part of our most painful past.

It wasn’t just Venezuelans who were deported to El Salvador on March 15th and ended up at CECOT. Who else was on those planes?

As far as we know, there are at least four different categories of people who came in those first three flights. One, Venezuelans suspected of belonging to the Tren de Aragua crime organization. Two, Venezuelan undocumented migrants, completely unrelated to this criminal organization. Three, Salvadoran undocumented migrants. Four, Salvadoran members of the MS-13 gang. This included at least one gang boss who was preparing to stand trial in the United States alongside 26 other big bosses of the MS-13, some of them who had been freed from prison by the Bukele administration as part of the secret agreement his administration had negotiated with the gang.

Based on El Faro’s reporting, I gather that some of these gang leaders potentially had a lot of dirt on Bukele.

That’s right. Bukele made that secret agreement with the gangs five years ago that helped his party win elections. In exchange, Mr. Bukele freed some of the gang bosses, including a few who were facing extradition to the U.S. After leaving El Salvador they were captured in Mexico and sent to the United States where they were indicted. Some of the indictments include allegations of the gang’s collusion with authorities in El Salvador. We also know that when Mr. Bukele offered Marco Rubio to receive deportees and criminals, he also requested that the gang bosses be sent back to El Salvador, and at least one of them was included in those first flights.

Is Bukele asking for the U.S. to deport these gang leaders to El Salvador specifically to bury any information that they might have — I mean, to put them in jail so they can’t tell their secrets?.

That’s what we think. As you know, MS-13 is now considered a terrorist organization in the United States. If the trial in New York proves Mr. Bukele’s deals with them, it could potentially be very damaging since it would mean that he had illegal deals with a terrorist organization and also illegally freed some of the terrorist organization leaders.

So what happened to the charges that the US had against these MS-13 leaders?

We only know of one so far. In this specific case of this one single person, we found federal court documents indicating the Justice Department and U.S. attorney assigned to the case asked the judge to dismiss the charges against this gang leader in order for him to be deported. And that’s what happened.

How would you qualify Bukele’s regime? I’ve seen it described as bordering on fascist.

I would qualify Mr. Bukele as an authoritarian populist. That is not ideological, but rather a project of accumulation of power. Until recently, Nayib Bukele was a member of the former guerilla party, the extreme leftist FMLN, and benefited from the Venezuelan government’s Alba Petróleos fund.Then quite suddenly he became almost libertarian and started to flirt with authoritarian and extreme rightist movements all over the world, including, of course, the United States. So I would say that his project is not ideological, but rather the complete grab of the state to accumulate power and wealth.

The Trump administration has praised Bukele for slashing crime in El Salvador, and yet just two years ago, the State Department cited reports of arbitrary killings, forced disappearances and torture. Is the Trump administration ignoring this evidence or is there something in Bukele’s harsh policies that they connect with?

I can’t answer that. I think you know much more about the nature of Mr. Trump’s administration. What I can say is that Mr. Bukele is an important figure in this far-right, authoritarian populism all over the world because he has been very successful in grabbing power and still keeping his popularity high. So that makes him a very attractive person for all the people in this movement.

For your typical Salvadoran, is life better because of some of the moves Bukele has made to reduce the power of the gangs?

Mr. Bukele has effectively taken the gangs out of the communities of Salvadorian people and lowered the murder rate in the country. So life is apparently better, but we know how in exchange for this so-called security, one person or one group of people is grabbing power, dismantling democracy, and there’s no more accountability. He has brought the army back to our political life, which was something we thought was over in 1992 when the peace agreements ended our civil war and built the basis for our democracy. Those pillars that started our democratic life came tumbling down. They are not there anymore. There’s no more checks and balances. There’s a lot of violence still in El Salvador but now it’s been inflicted by the authorities. Police and the army now can make arrests without a judge’s order and hold anyone in prison almost indefinitely. Seventy-thousand people have been detained in these years, which makes El Salvador the country with the highest incarceration rate, even above the United States. I don’t know of any experience when only through repression you really canceled a violence that has grown out of a society that is not functioning. Let me quote Archbishop Romero, who was killed in El Salvador in 1980. He used to say, violence will not be eradicated unless we address its root causes. And we have to know that gangs are just the most radical, the most horrible, and the most violent expression of a dysfunctional society. But if we don’t address the causes that built a fertile ground for these young kids to become so violent, then we are not solving any problem.