AS THE MEETING came to an end, it looked less like a peace parley and more like a business negotiation. On February 18th, when the Kremlin’s men met Donald Trump’s diplomats in Saudi Arabia, Kirill Dmitriev set out (perhaps exaggerated) numbers. American companies, he said, had lost $324bn by leaving Russia after the start of the war in Ukraine. Why not come back? Mr Dmitriev touted opportunities for American firms and bigged up Moscow’s restaurant scene. His message found receptive ears. Marco Rubio, America’s secretary of state, enthused about the “historic economic and investment opportunities” of a peace deal. Mr Dmitriev praised Mr Trump for starting a “constructive conversation”.
The soft-spoken 49-year-old stood out from the grizzled diplomats who made up the rest of the Russian delegation. But, from Mr Putin’s point of view, he had good reason to be part of it. As the boss of one of Russia’s state-backed investment funds, Mr Dmitriev has been cutting deals for more than a decade. Mr Putin wants America to loosen sanctions on his economy. By dangling business opportunities and arguing that sanctions have cost American firms money, Mr Dmitriev is trying to convince Mr Trump to do just that.
Mr Dmitriev’s ease in the company of American businessmen makes him an ideal emissary to Trumpworld. Whereas many in Mr Putin’s circle rose up through the security services, Mr Dmitriev got his start in California during the 1990s. A degree from Stanford University led to jobs at McKinsey, a consultancy, and Goldman Sachs, a bank. In 2000 he received an MBA from Harvard Business School, a finishing school for Western capitalists. He then returned to Russia, where Mr Putin was at the beginning of his first term.
Mr Dmitriev soon put his corporate credentials to use. One of his first jobs in Russia was with the US-Russia Investment Fund, which the American government helped establish to open Russia to foreign capital. Another was with Icon Private Equity, which managed the fortune of Victor Pinchuk, an oligarch.
Mixing with post-Soviet elites opened doors. So did his marriage to Natalia Popova, a TV presenter and friend of Mr Putin’s daughter, who gave him an in with the Kremlin. A part-time model, Ms Popova once shared her home in Moscow with two servals (a type of African wild cat) and interviewed her husband on state TV for a documentary series about doing business in the Gulf.
In 2011 Mr Dmitriev convinced Dmitry Medvedev, who was sitting in for Mr Putin as president, to set up the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF). He has run it ever since. The RDIF is an unusual kind of state fund. Rather than using the country’s fossil-fuel riches to invest in assets overseas, the RDIF works more like a private-equity firm, seeking out foreign investors to partner with the Kremlin on joint ventures inside Russia. Soon after taking up his job, Mr Dmitriev was back in America, schmoozing Wall Street bigwigs. For a while, investors were smitten. Stephen Schwarzman, Blackstone’s boss, and Leon Black of Apollo Global Management were just two private-equity titans who became advisers to the RDIF.
The love-in didn’t last. After Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 the pair ended their association with the RDIF. Sanctions made it harder to attract Western capital. But, as David Szakonyi of George Washington University explains, it was Mr Dmitriev’s skill in finding non-Western sources of finance that proved his worth to Mr Putin. Money flooded into the RDIF from Asia and the Gulf. In 2015 Saudi Arabia invested $10bn in the RDIF. Two years later China did the same. By 2022 the RDIF had facilitated more than $40bn in foreign investment in Russia across 100 deals—and claimed solid returns. In 2022, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, America hit the RDIF—and Mr Dmitriev—with sanctions. The RDIF “is widely considered a slush fund” for Mr Putin, America’s Treasury said at the time.
Mr Dmitriev is more than just a money man. During the pandemic, when the RDIF funded Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine, Mr Dmitriev was at the forefront of the Kremlin’s vaccine diplomacy—a strategy aimed at boosting Russia’s global standing by selling its vaccine to poorer countries. And in recent days he has established himself as Mr Putin’s main envoy to Mr Trump’s circle. When Russia released Marc Fogel, an imprisoned American teacher, in exchange for America’s release of Alexander Vinnik, a cyber-criminal, on February 11th, Mr Dmitriev was busy behind the scenes. Steve Witkoff, a real-estate tycoon whom Mr Trump has made one of his top foreign-policy negotiators, praised Mr Dmitriev as “an important interlocutor”.
In Saudi Arabia Mr Dmitriev helped to turn talks about peace into a meeting about money, giving the event a surreal air. In doing so, he was playing to the proclivities of Mr Trump, who sees access to Ukraine’s mineral wealth and winding down American aid as among the main reasons for ending the war. “The Kremlin wants to structure these talks as a corporate negotiation: businesspeople talking to businesspeople about politics,” says Mr Szakonyi. It turns out both sides can practise the art of the deal.■