After a decade of vilifying Americans as "weak, decaying" and "top enemies" at the same time, Putin suddenly came up with a surreal offer, inviting US investors to Russia for extraction of mineral resources. He advertises a long list of those in Russia, including Kabardino-Balkaria which I know very well from personal visits and I can testify the tungsten-molybdenum mine he's talking about is almost entirely destroyed after years of neglects. This offer is the more ridiculous that for years Putin has been portraying USA as a country only waiting to put their hand on Russian resources, yet he's the one now coming up with an offer to do literally this. Interestingly, Putin also puts resources in the "new territories" (parts of Ukraine occupied by Russia) into the offer whereas Russia neither controls many of them and those it controls its army has completely destroyed.

As a reminder, Putin already has some practical experience in trading rare earth metals with Americans - in 1992 as a young colonel of KGB he headed Foreign Relations Committee in St. Petersburg, which granted licenses for export of natural resources, including rare earth metals, to shady Western companies in exchange for food. As the food never arrived and the resources were valued at below costs, the Committee was suspected of fraud and corruption. Putin's activities were investigated by a Duma commission led by Marina Salye, but were abruptly stopped by Putins' political patron Anatoly Sobchak.