Kirill Dmitriev is not a professional diplomat. But the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth has emerged as a key player in drafting a new proposal to end Moscow’s war in Ukraine.
That is perhaps no surprise: A former investment banker, Dmitriev has increasingly served as a back-channel communicator between the Kremlin and allies of U.S. President Donald Trump, despite being on the U.S. sanctions list.
Dmitriev’s lack of formal diplomatic credentials may work in his favor, said Boris Bondarev, a former Russian diplomat who quit in protest after Russia’s 2022 invasion. In sending Dmitriev to talk with Steve Witkoff, Trumps’ special envoy, the Kremlin has found someone with whom the real estate magnate can feel at ease, he said.
“To work with him well, you need to find the right contact, someone who can win him over,” Bondarev said.
Bridging East and West
Dmitriev was born in 1975 in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, then part of the Soviet Union. In his youth, he took part in a school exchange program in the U.S. and went on to study at Stanford University as an undergraduate, according to a biography published by Russian state media outlet TASS.
By 2000, he had graduated with an MBA from Harvard Business School. Later, he worked with U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs and consulting firm McKinsey & Company, according to a profile on the World Economic Forum’s website.
But despite this early start in the world of New York finance, Dmitriev would cement his reputation while working in private equity firms in Russia and Ukraine.
In 2011, when the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) was created, Dmitriev was appointed CEO. As head of the sovereign wealth fund, he represented the country on the global stage, working closely with a number of large Western firms as he sought to attract foreign investment to Russia.
He became known as a savvy negotiator with a more modern touch than the older, Soviet-trained diplomats at the top levels of Russia’s Foreign Ministry, said political analyst Anton Barbashin.
Dmitriev was particularly successful at negotiating closer financial ties between Russia and countries such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the analyst said.
“This is basically where he kind of got his credits as a diplomat,” said Barbashin. “He generally had a reputation of a straight-to-business person, very business-oriented.”
And he may be particularly suited to diplomacy with the Trump administration.
Dmitriev “understands the Americans, specifically the Trump Americans: the business-oriented people who think in terms of profits, who think in terms of deals,” said Barbashin.
Connections beyond the business world
Dmitriev also has connections to the Putin family. Dmitriev’s wife, Natalia Popova, is deputy director of Russian nonprofit Innopraktika, which is headed by the president’s daughter, Katerina Tikhonova.
In 2022, in the wake of Russia’s invasion, the U.S. placed on both Dmitriev and the RDIF under sanctions. At the time, the U.S. Treasury described the banker as “a close associate of Putin.”
In February 2025, Dmitriev was named Russian special presidential envoy on foreign investment and economic cooperation.
In his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections, special counsel Robert Mueller said that Dmitriev met with Erik Prince, a major Trump donor and the founder of controversial security firm formerly known as Blackwater, in January 2017, as Trump was preparing to take office and the Russian government was seeking contacts with the incoming administration.
In an interview with Russian news outlet RBC in 2020, Dmitriev acknowledged that he had engaged in “various discussions on how to improve relations between Russia and the United States,” while brushing off any suggestion of wrongdoing.
“There is nothing secret about this; we discuss it completely openly,” he said.
Dmitriev’s role remains an informal one. If the current peace proposals succeed, then Dmitriev “would definitely get a very, very high five from Vladimir Putin,” said Barbashin.
But any proposal he may draft with Witkoff or any other U.S. official would still need to be approved by the Kremlin — and almost certainly would be heavily edited in the process.
So while he may be garnering attention now, former Russian diplomat Bondarev noted that Moscow can disown Dmitriev “at any moment.”
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Associated Press writer Dasha Litvinova in Tallinn, Estonia, contributed to this report.
