Volodymyr Zelensky will land in Washington on Friday to sign a mineral deal that Donald Trump has described as “a very big agreement”.

“We’ve been able to make a deal where we’re going to get our money back and we’re going to get a lot of money in the future,” the US president said.

“We’re going to make a deal with Russia and Ukraine to stop killing people.”

Trump is keen to extract as much as $500bn (£394bn) from Ukraine via mining rights, supposedly in repayment for the support offered by the US in the war with Russia.

Ukraine has large resources of iron, coal, oil, gas and – importantly – deposits of materials such as lithium, graphite and rare earth metals, all of which are important in tech and clean energy.