EU and Ukraine cooperate to reduce dependence on Russian raw materials
The European Commission and the Ukrainian government have insisted on the urgency for the European Union to lower its dependence on other countries for critical raw materials following the situation left by the war over Moscow’s resources and assured that they will strengthen their cooperation in this area since Ukraine has significant reserves of the same. On Tuesday Kiev signed a memorandum of understanding with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development to modernize the management of Ukrainian geological data, after they sealed with the EU in July 2021 a strategic agreement on raw materials.
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“The European energy crisis caused by Gazprom’s manipulative actions and blackmail showed us all that critical dependence on a single supplier leads to disastrous consequences, that is why we must prevent the repetition of a similar scenario in the sphere of raw materials to strengthen mutual resistance to possible future crises,” Ukrainian President Deny Schmyhal has said.
During his telematic speech at a conference on raw materials organized in Brussels, the Ukrainian president explained that the Russian invasion has forced to postpone the plans they had to implement the strategic partnership with the EU in 2022, but he defended that Ukraine can be an important partner for the EU-27. Ukraine, he recalled, was last year among the ten largest producers in the world of materials such as titanium, magnesium, zirconium or graphite, among others, and has deposits of 20 of the 30 minerals identified as critical by the EU.
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“We are ready to join efforts with the EU to strengthen strategic autonomy and achieve complete independence of Russian resources,” said Schmyhal, who called for his country to be a “fundamental part” of the Critical Raw Materials Act to be presented by the European Commission in the first quarter of 2023. For European Commission Vice-President Maros Sefcovic, the EU-Ukraine partnership can “bear fruit for both sides.”
On the one hand, it will help Ukraine to “bring its policies and regulatory frameworks closer to the EU, as well as to develop and better integrate its value chains in raw materials and batteries” within the European single market, while “creating impulses for reconstruction, economic development and employment”. The EU-27 will benefit from further diversification of its raw material sources and a strengthening of its industrial base and “know-how” that are “crucial to preserving its global competitiveness,” according to Sefcovic. “By working together with like-minded countries, such as Ukraine, but also the United States, Canada, Norway, Greenland and the Western Balkans, we can also prevent critical raw materials from being used as a weapon,” the EU vice president said.
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The raw materials considered critical are essential for the ecological and digital transition, as they are used in everything from solar panels to wind turbine blades and a large part of digital devices. These include titanium, lithium, magnesium and rare earths, among others. China is the main supplier of many of them, particularly rare earths, but Russia is, for example, Europe’s largest supplier of palladium, which is essential for chip manufacturing.
