Putin propagandist or key to peace with Ukraine?

Kirill Dmitriev is a rare breed of Russian diplomat.

At 50 he is relatively young and he has a deep understanding of the US, having studied and worked there for several years.

He is also a man of commerce, as head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, and a good fit for his opposite number in the Trump administration, special envoy Steve Witkoff.

Dmitriev now finds himself under the spotlight over a draft peace plan that emerged after he spent three days with Witkoff in Miami.

His team has refused to comment on its proposals, which read like a Putin wishlist, requiring Ukraine to cede territory under its control and slash the size of its military.

Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky has been careful not to reject its terms, but says any deal must bring a “dignified peace, with terms that respect our independence, our sovereignty”.

Putin’s special envoy understands modern Ukraine better than most in Moscow. He was brought up in Ukraine, and a friend claims that as a 15-year-old Dmitriev took part in pro-democracy protests in Kyiv before the fall of the Soviet Union.

He has been a fixture of US-Russian diplomatic initiatives pretty much since the start of Trump’s second presidency – and Steve Witkoff has been a regular counterpart.

“We are sure we are on the road to peace, and as peacemakers we need to make it happen,” Dmitriev told a conference in Saudi Arabia in late October.

The pair appear to have first crossed paths in February 2025 when Putin’s envoy played a role in securing the release of an American teacher from a Russian jail.

“There’s a gentleman from Russia, his name is Kirill, and he had a lot to do with this. He was important. He was an important interlocutor bridging the two sides,” Witkoff told reporters.

Days later, when US and Russian diplomats met in Saudi Arabia, in effect bringing an end to Russia’s diplomatic isolation in the West, Dmitriev took part in talks on economic relations and Witkoff was there too.

Dmitriev’s direct approach to Trump officials has not always paid off.

When Trump announced sanctions on Russia’s top two oil firms last month, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent labelled him a “Russian propagandist” for suggesting it would mean higher US fuel prices at the pump.

Unlike the majority of Putin’s entourage, the Russian leader’s envoy is comfortable in a US TV studio. He is careful to praise Trump’s diplomatic skills while giving Western viewers the Russian government narrative in their own language.

“I’m not a military guy… but the position of [the] Russian military is they only hit military targets,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper recently, days after a kindergarten was bombed in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. “I’m just working to have dialogue and make sure that the conflict is ended as soon as possible.”

Dmitriev certainly is not a military guy, he’s a private investment specialist with an eye for a deal.

Witkoff may rate him, but in 2022 during Joe Biden’s presidency, the US Treasury called him a “known Putin ally” and imposed sanctions on the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) which he has run since 2011.

“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,” it said.

Dmitriev’s attitude to the Biden years is pretty clear: under Biden there was no attempt to understand the Russian position, he argues, while Trump’s team stopped World War Three.

It is claimed that Dmitriev has accumulated a real estate fortune with his wife, TV presenter Natalia Popova.

Popova is a friend and colleague of Vladimir Putin’s daughter, Katerina Tikhonova – and deputy head of Tikhonova’s tech firm Innopraktika. Dmitriev is also widely seen as part of Tikhonova’s circle.

His rise to the top in Moscow is a far cry from his childhood in Kyiv, as the son of two scientists. Dmitriev’s father is a well known cell biologist in Ukraine and his mother a geneticist.

That scientific background may have influenced his move to use his Russian sovereign wealth fund to finance Russia’s Covid vaccine Sputnik V.

Dmitriev is believed to have first met Russia’s long-time leader at the start of his presidency in 2000, but he has not always agreed with his views.

While Putin saw the collapse of the Soviet Union as the “biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”, a friend claims Dmitriev joined an anti-Soviet student protest in Kyiv at the age of 15.

His relationship with the US began the same year, in 1990, when he took part in a student exchange programme in New Hampshire, where a local newspaper quoted him highlighting Ukraine’s national identity: “Ukraine had a long history as an independent nation before it became part of the Russian empire.”

He later returned to the US as a college student and wrote a thesis on privatisation in Ukraine while at Stanford University. In his thesis proposal he suggested the research would “prepare me better for making a contribution to the reform process in Ukraine”.

After earning an MBA at Harvard, he worked for McKinsey in Los Angeles, Prague and Moscow, and then joined the US-Russia Investment Fund, set up by the US to ease Russia’s transition to a market economy.

Dmitriev appeared critical of Putin’s crackdown on Russia’s oligarchs in 2003 in a column for the Vedomosti business paper. “The world is shrewd enough to know the difference between following the letter of the law and using the law as a tool of influence,” he wrote.

By 2007 he was back in Ukraine, in charge of investment fund Icon Private Equity, an investment fund with offices in Kyiv and Moscow.

Increasingly he lamented Ukraine’s political “instability” and suggested Russia was better placed to respond to the global financial crisis.

He was a regular guest on TV talk shows and in 2010 he warned Ukraine would face an “economic Holodomor” if it pursued a policy of isolation from Russia: a reference to the Ukrainian famine of the1930s brought on by the policies of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

In 2011 he moved back to Russia to take charge of the newly-launched Russian Direct Investment Fund and remains there to this day.

His overtures to the Trump administration have not come out of the blue.

The Mueller report into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia during the 2016 US presidential election refers to Dmitriev meeting campaign supporters after the vote. But it was fromFebruary 2025 that contacts with the US were stepped up.

Much of his work has been on diplomacy, but he has always had an eye on commercial opportunity.

He proposed joint energy projects in the Arctic, and suggested partnering Russia’s sovereign wealth fund with US companies in developing rare earth deposits.

He has also spoken of Russia offering Elon Musk “a small-sized nuclear power plant for a mission to Mars” and even an $8bn (£6bn) “Putin-Trump” rail tunnel linking their two countries beneath the Bering Strait.

Dmitriev’s stock may be rising in Russia, but his reputation has taken a dive in Ukraine, where sanctions have been imposed on him for alleged crimes against Ukraine and Ukrainians.