# Kirill Dmitriev Head of Russia's sovereign wealth fund, the [[Russian Direct Investment Fund]] (RDIF), and since February 2025 [[Vladimir Putin]]'s special envoy for foreign investment and economic cooperation. He is the Kremlin's **business-channel negotiator with the Trump world** — the same role he tried to play in 2016–17 through intermediaries, now played in person with [[Steve Witkoff]] and [[Jared Kushner]]. He is unusual among Putin's circle: Kyiv-born (1975), educated at Stanford and Harvard Business School, formerly of McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, fluent in American deal language. That fluency is his function. He pitches Russia to Trump's people as a set of investment opportunities rather than a security problem. ## The first Trump channel (2016–2017) The [[Mueller Investigation]] documented Dmitriev looking for a way into the incoming administration: - **Seychelles, January 2017.** [[George Nader]], an adviser to the UAE leadership, arranged for Dmitriev to meet [[Erik Prince]] — [[Blackwater]]'s founder, a Trump donor and brother of Betsy DeVos — at a gathering hosted by the Emirati crown prince in the Seychelles. Prince described it to Congress as a chance encounter over a beer; Mueller's report treated it as an attempted back channel. - **Through Kushner's circle.** The report also describes Dmitriev passing a U.S.–Russia "reconciliation" proposal toward the transition through Rick Gerson, a hedge-fund friend of Kushner's. Neither channel produced charges, but together they are the clearest documented case of a sanctioned-state financier shopping for a direct line to Trump's family and donors — the pattern the vault tracks under [[Tech-Right Russia Alignment]] and [[Russian Oligarchy]]. ## Sanctions After the 2014 attack on Ukraine, the Treasury's [[Office of Foreign Assets Control]] put debt and equity restrictions on RDIF's predecessor entity (2015). On February 28, 2022, days after the full invasion, it sanctioned RDIF and Dmitriev personally, saying that while "officially a sovereign wealth fund, RDIF is widely considered a slush fund for President Vladimir Putin and is emblematic of Russia's broader kleptocracy." His wife, Natalia Popova, is a close friend of Putin's daughter Katerina Tikhonova, who runs the Innopraktika foundation. ## The second channel (2025–2026) Putin named Dmitriev special presidential envoy on **February 23, 2025**, weeks into Trump's second term, and he became the Russian face of the Ukraine talks on the economic side: | Date | What happened | |---|---| | Feb 2025 | Named special envoy; takes part in the first U.S.–Russia talks of the new administration | | Oct 24–26, 2025 | Spends three days in Miami with Witkoff and Trump's team; Axios reports the U.S. then drafted a 28-point Ukraine plan with Russian input ([[28-Point Peace Plan]]). Dmitriev: "we feel the Russian position is really being heard." | | Mar 2026 | Meets Witkoff and Kushner to discuss Russian energy (Moscow Times) | | Sept 5, 2026 | Attends Putin's Kremlin meeting with the U.S. envoys | | Sept 25, 2026 | Meets Witkoff and Kushner in New York during the UN General Assembly; Bloomberg reported he was to receive new U.S. proposals on the war | > [!warning] What this is > A sanctioned Russian state financier is negotiating the end of a war with two Trump envoys who are real-estate developers, one of them the president's son-in-law. The talks mix a ceasefire with investment offers — the "business deals for peace" frame Dmitriev has pushed since 2017. The vault treats him as the continuity figure between the first Trump–Russia story and the second. ## See Also - [[Russian Direct Investment Fund]] - [[Steve Witkoff]] · [[Jared Kushner]] — his current counterparts - [[George Nader]] · [[Erik Prince]] · [[Blackwater]] — the 2017 Seychelles channel - [[Russo-Ukrainian War]] · [[Volodymyr Zelensky]] - [[Mueller Investigation]] · [[Trump-Russia Arc Timeline]] - [[Russian Oligarchy]] · [[Siloviki]]