RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — He’s an investment banker with a distinctly American pedigree, having studied at Harvard and Stanford before going on to work at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey. But as U.S. and Russian negotiators work to secure a ceasefire in Ukraine, Kirill Dmitriev will be trying his best to secure the best deal for one man: President Vladimir Putin.
fluent in English and married to a close friend of Putin’s daughter, Dmitriev, 49, is a longtime confidante of the Russian leader, entrusted with running the country’s sovereign wealth fund and a key player in the recent high-level talks in Saudi Arabia about ending the war in Ukraine.
Dmitriev was involved in the meeting between Russian foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy adviser, and an American delegation led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. He also attended separate meetings in Riyadh and made an argument that might appeal to President Donald Trump — that sanctions had cost U.S. companies billions of dollars.
“His main role, his main task, is what Putin assigned him: to get the Americans to lift sanctions pressure. That’s his job,” Andrei fedorov, Russia’s former deputy foreign minister, told NBC News in a telephone conversation last week.
Putin thinks of Dmitriev as an official who can be relied on, fedorov said, adding that he was a “very good executor” when it came to negotiations.
Dmitriev has already courted the new administration in the White House by playing a crucial role in facilitating the prisoner swap that led to the release of Marc fogel, three and a half years after a Russian court handed him a 14-year jail sentence for a minor medical cannabis infraction.
fogel, a 63-year-old teacher from Pennsylvania, flew back to the U.S. last week with Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, who credited a man called “Kirill” for making the deal.
“We had a reach-out from someone who is a go-between between the Russian government and the American government and I presented it,” Witkoff told fox News a few days after they touched down on U.S. soil. “The president and we all determined that it was credible, that there was an opportunity to get Marc fogel back, and the president listened, carefully decided it was actionable and said hop on the plane and let’s hope to get a good result.”
Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was also heavily involved in the deal to secure fogel’s release, according to a senior Saudi official who credited Dmitriev as “absolutely the go-to” and “highly active” in the negotiations surrounding the exchange, which saw convicted money launderer Alexander Vinnik return to Russia.
Dmitriev has long established ties with the Saudi leader and, in October 2019, he was awarded the King Abdulaziz Second-Class Order of Merit, the kingdom’s highest award, for his work to strengthen cooperation between Russia and Saudi Arabia after he helped secure an oil price agreement under the expanded OPEC+ producers’ forum.
“He is well connected with the Saudis; he is one of them,” fedorov said. “They make money together.” He added that when the prisoner exchange was broached, “the Saudis were the first to confirm that they were willing to help with the matter.”
The Saudi award was another in a long list of honors for Dmitriev, who has been presented with no less than three titles, the Order of Alexander Nevsky, the Order of Honour and the Order of friendship, by the Kremlin.
But his success has come as little surprise to those who have tracked his career.
Born in what is now Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, but was then part of the Soviet Union, as a teenager Dmitriev took part of a high-school exchange with the U.S., where he later returned to earn a bachelor’s degree at Stanford University and an MBA at Harvard. In 2009 he was a “young global leader” at the World Economic forum.
He went on to work in Ukraine before moving back to Russia, where American business channels CNBC and Bloomberg would feature him because of his expertise on local markets.
Putin then tapped him up to head the Russian Direct Investment fund, which was created in 2011 to facilitate foreign investment.
Describing him as “extraordinarily smart,” a senior U.S. finance executive who asked not to be named to protect their business relationships, said Dmitriev was able to move in Western circles “with ease.”
“A lot of Russians who speak good English have no f---ing idea how we think,” he said. “He actually is a guy who has spent enough time with Westerners, particularly Americans, and he actually has a pretty good feel for how we process information.”
While Dmitriev was “very pro-American and pro-Western,” he added that he was “ultimately totally loyal and patriotic to Russia” and Putin.
In his role, he subsequently championed his country and encouraged investment in the face of hostility about the Russian annexation of Crimea.
He also played a part in early contacts with the U.S. when Trump was first elected president in 2016. Among the people he met was Erik Prince, the founder of the now defunct Blackwater security firm and a supporter of Trump’s 2016 presidential run.
Their secret meeting in the four Seasons Hotel in the Seychelles, on Jan. 11, 2017, was featured in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, which said Dmitriev sought an introduction to a Trump transition team member in order to begin improving U.S.-Russia ties.
Two years later, as Covid-19 pandemic took hold, Dmitriev worked to promote Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine.
But after Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on feb. 24, 2022, Dmitriev seemed to disappear from public view in the West, although he routinely attended major events in Russia and met Putin on several occasions. He also made regular media appearances in his homeland.
four days after Russian forces crossed into Ukraine, the U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctioned Dmitriev, calling him a “close associate of Putin.” His wife, Natalya Popova, “believed to be close to one of Putin’s daughters, Katerina Tikhonova,” was also sanctioned.
But after Trump was elected again last year, Dmitriev re-entered the spotlight praising the president’s “decisive leadership” as he issued a series of executive orders.
The week before Trump’s inauguration he met with Putin to talk about Russian investments, according to the Kremlin’s website.
After the ceasefire talks in Riyadh, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that both countries had agreed to re-establish “the functionality of our respective missions in Washington and Moscow” and that Washington would create a high-level team to work on a path to ending the war in Ukraine.
Dmitriev was there to discuss “economic issues,” according to Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy adviser.
Whether those discussions included the lifting of American sanctions is unclear, but fedorov, Russia’s former deputy foreign minister, was convinced that he would eventually achieve that goal.
“When he is given a task, he does it,” he said.
Keir Simmons reported from Riyadh and Natasha Lebedeva from Washington.
