On April 30, the United States and Ukraine signed an agreement “on the Establishment of a United States-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund” that concerns the sharing of revenues from the future extraction of Ukraine’s mineral and energy resources. Ukraine’s Minister of Economy announced the day the agreement was signed that it “will be submitted to the Verkhovna Rada [Ukrainian Parliament] for ratification.” But the United States has expressed no such plans for its own legislature. In this post, we explain why we believe that the agreement is likely a lawful “sole executive agreement” that the president need not submit to Congress and then analyze the relevance of recent reforms to the Case-Zablocki Act for the transparency of the agreement and an important related agreement that is being negotiated pursuant to it.
The U.S.-Ukraine Agreement: Legality and Transparency | Lawfare
