Kirill Dmitriev: ‘ruthlessly ambitious’ Kremlin figure behind Ukraine plan
When relations between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin soured this autumn, with the US president publicly accusing Moscow of blocking a path to a peace in Ukraine and announcing significant sanctions against Russia’s oil sector, one man saw an opening. Kirill Dmitriev, the US-savvy, Harvard-educated head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, boarded a plane to Florida late October, where he met Steve Witkoff, the property developer serving as Trump’s freelance envoy on Ukraine.
The two men, neither of whom has any real diplomatic experience, began drafting a plan that would impose draconian terms on Ukraine and hand Moscow sweeping influence over the country’s political and military sovereignty. The scheme, which surfaced in media reports on Wednesday, has thrust Dmitriev back into the global spotlight – a position, several people who have met him over the years say, he has long craved.
“Dmitriev is obsessed with being perceived as important,” said one source, who has known him since the Moscow business scene of the late 2000s. “He is ruthlessly ambitious,” the source added, describing him as “very thin on substance but exceptionally good at selling himself”. The source, like others, asked for anonymity so they could speak freely. “Fake it till you make it” was Dmitriev’s modus operandi, the source said. “And he has, objectively, made it very far.” It may come as a surprise to some that one of Moscow’s most aggressive champions was born in Soviet-era Ukraine. The son of prominent scientists, Dmitriev grew up and studied at Kyiv’s elite Lyceum No 145, a competitive maths and physics school where he made an impression on friends as a hard-working pupil who was obsessed with the US. “He was quite arrogant … but very systematic, and if he wanted to achieve something, he worked on that,” said Volodymyr Ariev, who was in the same year as Dmitriev and is now a Ukrainian MP. At 15, Dmitriev was selected by his school for a trip to the US – an experience that, according to Ariev, solidified his fascination with the country.
He later enrolled at Stanford University, followed by an MBA course at Harvard. In a 2000 New York Times story about Harvard’s business school, Dmitriev marvelled at the opportunities that came with his new course. “There’s a great sense of bonding with your teammates. You live together, go out at night to celebrate victories or drown sorrows,” Dmitriev says. He also foreshadowed his own ambition and knack for making connections: “I also go to New York for business development, to establish strategic alliances and meet with clients, four times a month.” After stints at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, his real business breakthrough came not in Moscow or New York but in Kyiv. From 2007 to 2011, he ran Icon Private Equity, a Ukrainian fund managing roughly $1bn, most of it belonging to the oligarch Victor Pinchuk, the son-in-law of the former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma. Pinchuk introduced him to Vladimir Dmitriev (no relation), then head of the Russian state development corporation VEB, according to a well-connected source in Moscow who has direct knowledge of the events.
Together, the two Dmitrievs persuaded the Kremlin to launch Russia’s foreign investment fund (RDIF) that would lure American, European and Gulf capital into Russia. The role – eventually overseeing $10bn – seemed to suit him perfectly, said a Russian business reporter who knew Dmitriev personally. The smooth-talking Dmitriev became a fixture in Davos, Riyadh and at global investor summits, gliding from panels on artificial intelligence to discreet bilateral meetings with sovereign funds. It was also around this time that Dmitriev’s personal connections to the Kremlin thickened. His wife, Natalia Popova, developed a close personal and professional relationship with Putin’s younger daughter, Katerina Tikhonova. Popova remains the deputy director of Innopraktika, Tikhonova’s research institute. An investigation by the Russian outlet the Insider also alleged close links between Dmitriev and Russia’s security services.
“He grew extremely confident, even pompous,” said the source who knew Dmitriev at the time. Sanctions imposed on Russia after the 2014 annexation of Crimea made it harder for Dmitriev to sell Moscow abroad, but he sensed an opening with Trump’s first election in 2016. One former RDIF colleague said Dmitriev swiftly ordered the fund to release a statement the morning after Trump’s win signalling support for the incoming president. Robert Mueller’s report on Russian 2016 US election meddling found that Dmitriev tapped his UAE network, drawn from one of the RDIF’s principal investors, to build a back channel to Trump’s first administration.
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Dmitriev was placed under sanctions by Washington. But Trump’s return to power handed him another lifeline. Dmitriev quickly began signalling to the White House that there was money to be made in any eventual peace deal, touting the prospect of multibillion-dollar contracts in the Arctic and other areas of US-Russia cooperation – a potent pitch for a business-obsessed administration. He set out specifically to cultivate a relationship with Witkoff, Trump’s trusted friend and longtime business associate, leaning heavily on the property mogul’s enthusiasm for deal-making. Together, the two men helped arrange the release of the US schoolteacher Marc Fogel in a prisoner swap in February – a gesture they framed as an early step toward repairing relations between Washington and Moscow.
But Dmitriev has not limited himself to Witkoff. Much of his public activity now appears focused on courting other prominent Maga figures and amplifying the US far right’s talking points. A fervent user of X, he posts daily about Europe’s migration “crisis,” accuses “globalists” of indoctrinating children with “pro-trans programmes” and regularly promotes conspiratorial rhetoric – once even adding a QAnon-style slogan popular with Trump’s most extreme base. Dmitriev’s Ukrainian background has not stood in the way of his rise. At 15, he told a local journalist during his trip to the US that Ukraine had a long and proud history of independence – and that rising nationalist sentiment would help “break the power of the communist system” – but he has since become one of the Kremlin’s most loyal advocates. “Dmitriev chose Putin’s side,” said Ariev, the Ukrainian MP, adding that most childhood friends had long since broken contact with him. Dmitriev’s closest school friend became a soldier in the Ukrainian army and was wounded in battle recently, Ariev added. The source who knew Dmitriev in Moscow in the 2010s said he almost never spoke about his place of birth. “He had no real interest in Ukraine. His attention was always on Moscow,” they said. Still, despite his fierce loyalty to Putin, Dmitriev’s meteoric rise has ruffled feathers within Russia’s ageing foreign policy establishment.
One source close to the Kremlin said they had offered to help Dmitriev with outreach to the Americans and with drafting a potential pathway to end the war in Ukraine – assistance Dmitriev flatly declined. “He could really use some advice on foreign relations, because he himself admitted to me he isn’t an expert on this. But he decided to go at it alone,” the source said. Dmitriev’s relationship with Sergei Lavrov, the long-serving foreign minister, is also notoriously poor. The rift between them is now an open secret in Moscow and has occasionally burst into the open. Lavrov and Dmitriev clashed last February during peace talks in Riyadh with the US, when the foreign minister tried to exclude him by removing the chair set out for him, according to two people who separately described the episode. Dmitriev ultimately joined the meeting after a call with Putin. “Dmitriev has made enemies in Russia. But right now, he is untouchable because he is proving to be very useful for Putin,” said the source close to the Kremlin. Shaun Walker contributed reporting