Forty years ago I lived in Ballarat where they made small motors at Norton Villers, Mars bars, Rivers clothing and shoes, big trailers at Freighter Industries, and a whole lot more I can no longer remember. Despite all that we had one of the highest unemployment rates in Australia.
If you only follow your own selected left wing sources, then you are living in an echo chamber and getting only half the information. I can read the Australian and the Age without my head exploding.
I deliberately watched more than ten video news items on Trump today, looking for a balanced report. Didn’t find any. They were all one way or the other, like they were reporting quite different events and meetings. No wonder society is polarised.
OME's map shows mineral deposits, which just means concentrations of minerals. Until they satisfy the categories listed by Onetrack they have little commercial value. And if they date from USSR times, they may not even exist. The usual lead time for deposits like these is five years to drill out then ten years or more to establish a mine. And the success rate for new mines from grass roots projects is something like one in 100.
Let me say again... there are no rare earth reserves in Ukraine. Reporting of mineral reserves is internationally governed by the Committee for Mineral Reserves International Reporting Standards. See The International Reporting Template - Crirsco . I have lectured about this in Moscow a couple of decades ago. The Russians in Ukraine had speculative estimates of what might be there but nothing upon which a commercial contact could be arranged.
The whole minerals thing is a Trump smoke screen for political agreements that will not stand public scrutiny.