Putin sends powerful economic envoy to court Trump administration

A close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin is in Washington for talks with the Trump administration, underlining the striking turnaround in relations between the United States and Russia, as the envoy is the most senior Russian official to visit since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Kirill Dmitriev, who runs Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, is meeting with Steve Witkoff, a real estate developer and close Trump ally who has been a key figure in efforts to secure an agreement to end the war in Ukraine, according to a person familiar with the meeting. The talks are “ongoing,” said this person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

Dmitriev, who needed a temporary waiver from U.S. sanctions barring him from visiting America, has been touting the economic benefits of improved relations between the United States and Russia. He’s been offering joint multibillion-dollar deals on rare earth minerals and cooperation on energy exploration and shipping routes in the Arctic. “We see many opportunities for cooperation in the investment and economic sphere,” Dmitriev told reporters at a business forum in Moscow last month.

A graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Business School who helped run a U.S.-backed private equity firm in Moscow in the 2000s, Dmitriev has positioned himself as someone the Trump administration can do business with. And he has the kind of powerful connections that matter in Moscow. His wife, Natalia Popova, is close friends with Putin’s youngest daughter Ekaterina Tikhonova, according to three former associates, and serves as deputy director of Innopraktika, Tikhonova’s technology foundation.

But Dmitriev’s visit follows signs of impatience on the part of President Donald Trump that Putin is slow-walking negotiations over Ukraine. Trump said last weekend that he was “pissed off” with the Russia president and could impose further sanctions on Russian oil if Putin couldn’t come to terms “on stopping the bloodshed in Ukraine” and “if I think it was Russia’s fault.”

Dmitriev may be here to assuage the administration and reemphasize the possibility of not only a peace settlement but also large financial deals.

The Russian wooing is founded on Putin’s cold calculation that Trump favors an international system where great powers divide up the world into spheres of interest, Russian observers said.

“Two such people can agree because this is mainly about money and power, and in this sense they have the same intentions,” said one former Kremlin official who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to be frank.

Late last month, for instance, Putin nodded to Trump’s interest in seizing Greenland for the United States. “It is a profound mistake to treat it as some preposterous talk by the new U.S. administration,” Putin said. “Nothing of the sort.”

The offering of business deals and the forging of relationships through businessmen like Witkoff is a “tested mechanism” for the Kremlin, said Oleh Rybachuk, former chief of staff to Ukraine’s first Western-leaning president, Viktor Yushchenko. “For these guys it’s natural,” he said, as well as being part of an attempt to access Trump directly.

The Kremlin singled Dmitriev out to take part in the talks specifically to appeal to Trump’s business sensibilities, according to a Russian academic with close ties to senior Moscow diplomats. “Everyone understands that Trump is a businessman and thinks in economic and monetary terms,” the academic said. Dmitriev is “a person who can speak” Trump’s language.

Dmitriev also had old ties with some in Trump’s circle. He first sought introductions to Trump’s allies in November 2016 ahead of Trump’s first term through George Nader, a close business associate in the United Arab Emirates. Nader eventually arranged a secret meeting between Dmitriev and Erik Prince, the founder of the Blackwater security company and a Trump supporter, in the Seychelles in January 2017.

In the weeks before Trump’s second inauguration, Russian officials approached Witkoff while Trump’s envoywas in Doha, Qatar, for talks on brokering a ceasefire in Gaza, according to three people familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details. That eventually led to the prisoner exchange coordinated by Dmitriev that saw Marc Fogel, an American schoolteacher jailed in Russia for possessing a small amount of cannabis, exchanged for Alexander Vinnik, a Russian cybercriminal.

Witkoff later told Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, during a public interview at a conference in Miami that the outreach came from “someone in Russia who you know, Kirill.”

The prisoner exchange was intended as a “gesture of goodwill” to help break the deadlock in relations with the United States and kick-start talks on resolving the conflict in Ukraine, according to the Russian academic. When Witkoff went to Moscow to bring Fogel home, he met with Putin.

The prisoner exchange and his evolving relationship with Witkoff represented a return to the spotlight for Dmitriev. He’d retreated into the shadows after the U.S. Treasury sanctioned him in February 2022, saying that “Putin and his inner circle of cronies have long relied on the [Russian sovereign wealth fund] and Dmitriev to raise funds abroad, including in the United States.”

Although the sovereign wealth fund had been established as a means for developing direct relationships with international investors for direct investments in Russia, it “is widely considered a slush fund for President Vladimir Putin and is emblematic of Russia’s broader kleptocracy,” the U.S. Treasury said.

Dmitriev, it added, “leveraged his ties to universities and organizations in the United States to serve as a representative for the Russian president to American institutions.”

Some Western bankers who’d previously worked with Dmitriev said he owed much of his standing to his close relationship through his wife to Putin’s family. “I could not understand how he got that role until someone explained that his wife is friends with Putin’s daughter,” said Christopher Barter, the former head of Goldman Sachs in Moscow. “It is typical of Putin to appoint someone inadequate to do something that’s vital.”

But others said Dmitriev’s political connections have made him a force to be reckoned with. “At the end of the day Dmitriev can put money and influence into any transaction that fits his agenda or fits his boss’s agenda. You have to listen to him,” one long time former American investor in Russia said.

Dmitriev led the business charm offensive at the peace talks in Riyadh in February, telling the U.S. delegation that American companies had lost $300 billion by leaving the Russian market following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Seasoned American investors with a long history of doing business in Russia said those figures were inflated.“It’s hard to understand how the Kremlin is coming up with these numbers,” said Craig Kennedy, a former vice chairman at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, explaining that one of the biggest write-offs by an American company exiting Russia following the invasion was just $4.5 billion by ExxonMobil from its Sakhalin-1 project.

“How do you get anywhere close to $300 billion?” he said. “It strains credibility.”

Witkoff, however, appears to have bought into some of Dmitriev’s pitch, telling Tucker Carlson in an interview broadcast in March that he hoped for cooperation between Russia and the United States on integrating energy policies in the Arctic, sharing sea lanes and to “maybe send LNG gas into Europe together, maybe collaborate on AI together.”

Siobhán O’Grady in Kyiv and Michael Birnbaum in Washington contributed to this report.

Catherine Belton is an international investigative reporter for The Washington Post, reporting on Russia. She is the author of “Putin’s People,” a New York Times Critics’ Book of 2020 and a book of the year for the Times, the Economist and the Financial Times. Belton has worked for Reuters and the Financial Times.