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President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has instructed Ukraine’s domestic security service to investigate the leak of the latest US proposal for profiting from Ukrainian assets, said government officials, in a probe that includes the use of polygraph tests.
The investigation comes amid deepening tensions between Kyiv and the Trump administration over the terms of a proposed deal on critical minerals and energy assets.
Ukrainian officials say they were caught off guard by the scope of the latest US demands, and view as politically untenable parts of Washington’s proposal for profiting from their country’s infrastructure.
President Donald Trump accused the Ukrainian president this week of “trying to back out” of the deal, adding that Zelenskyy would face “big problems” if he did not sign it soon.
The Ukrainian officials said that lie detector tests had been administered on staff across several ministries, but declined to give further details or specify how many individuals had been questioned.
The office of Ukraine’s president declined to comment. The security service said in a statement that it works within the law to protect Ukraine’s security and keeps certain details about its activities confidential.
Polygraph tests are controversial and the science behind them has been questioned, but Ukraine’s law enforcement agencies have frequently used them for purposes including criminal investigations and screening foreigners looking to join the army.
The investigation follows the publication of details from the draft agreement on March 26 by opposition MP Yaroslav Zheleznyak, who said he had obtained a copy. The Financial Times separately obtained the document and published its contents the following day.
Zelenskyy told the FT at a briefing on March 28 he found it “strange” the US document had leaked. “I wonder who is transmitting this information,” he said.
The Trump administration’s latest proposal significantly expands on its earlier offer, superseding an initial framework deal agreed with Kyiv in February. That agreement was later abandoned after Zelenskyy’s bust-up with President Donald Trump and vice-president JD Vance in the White House.
Crucially, the revised proposal still offers no formal security guarantees to Ukraine.
Trump’s Treasury secretary Scott Bessent has argued that formal security guarantees are unnecessary, because any US investment in Ukraine’s critical minerals sector would in itself deter further Russian aggression — a view not shared in Kyiv.
The revised terms form part of Trump’s plan to end Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine and recoup billions of dollars he believes the US is owed for having helped Kyiv defend itself against Moscow’s invasion.
Last Friday, Zelenskyy rejected Trump’s insistence that billions of dollars of military assistance from the US to date should be viewed as loans to be repaid through the agreement.
The new proposal calls for the creation of a joint supervisory board to manage revenues from oil, gas and mineral projects, covering all major energy assets across the country.
Senior Ukrainian officials have raised concerns that it could undermine their nation’s sovereignty, send future revenues abroad and disrupt integration with the EU.
“We cannot accept any arrangement that undermines our EU path,” Zelenskyy said last week.
Zelenskyy told reporters at a briefing in his office on Friday that officials and lawyers have been working on changes to the US proposal, which they hope the Trump administration will accept, in a new draft ahead of a visit to Washington next week by Ukrainian officials.
