President Donald Trump’s 28-point peace proposal for Ukraine is facing criticism amid claims it skews heavily in Vladimir Putin’s favour.
Trump has given Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky until Thursday to accept the deal, which would cede territory to Moscow, take Nato off the table for Ukraine and allow Russia back into the G8.
As Zelensky faces a difficult choice, US officials and lawmakers have expressed their concern about Russian involvement in the plan after it was revealed the administration had held meetings with a blacklisted Kremlin official beforehand.
Kirill Dmitriev, a close ally of Putin, is the CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) and assumed the office of the special presidential envoy on Foreign Investment and Economic Cooperation on 23 February this year despite little diplomatic experience.
Dmitriev and his fund have been under US sanctions, which effectively bar American citizens and companies from dealing with them, since 2022.
But that did not stop Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner from meeting with Dmitriev in Miami at the end of October, it has emerged. Witkoff has met with Dmitriev several times this year and the Trump administration has issued a special waiver to allow his entry, a US official told Reuters.
Confirming his involvement in the latest talks in an interview with Axios, Dmitriev said “we feel the Russian position is really being heard”.
The 28 point plan that resulted from that three day meeting has been described as “a Russian wish list” by critics and welcomed by Putin.
Who is Kirill Dmitriev?
Dmitriev was born in 1975 in soviet-era Kyiv and despite having limited diplomatic experience has become involved in the war behind the scenes. Those who knew him growing up have said he was a hard-working pupil obsessed with the United States.
“He was quite arrogant … but very systematic, and if he wanted to achieve something, he worked on that,” Ukrainian MP Volodymyr Ariev, who was in the same school year as Dmitriev, told The Guardian.
Dmitriev was one of the first Soviet exchange students from Ukraine to visit the US when he came to a host family in New Hampshire in 1989.
Despite no prior English language schooling, he found success at Foothill Community College in California and would later transfer to Stanford University, where he would earn a BA in economics. He’d later go to Harvard Business School to achieve an MBA.
Dmitriev has since made his name as a businessman, cutting his teeth early on for McKinsey & Company and Goldman Sachs. In 2011, he was appointed as CEO of the newly created RDIF, a sovereign wealth fund to make equity co-investments in Russia companies.
“Dmitriev is obsessed with being perceived as important,” one source who has known him since the late 2000s told The Guardian. “He is ruthlessly ambitious…. very thin on substance but exceptionally good at selling himself”.
Concerns around his role in the talks
The Trump administration’s discussions with Dmitriev have caused concern for those within the intelligence community, a US official told Reuters.
Dmitriev has previously used his role at RDIF to make inroads with various western governments and businesses, despite American sanctions.
In a 2017 meeting with Erik Prince, the former CEO of Blackwater and a Trump ally, Dmitriev discussed US-Russia relations, according to a Department of Justice report published by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in 2019. Mueller’s team was investigating ties between the Trump team and Russia.
The businessman worked directly with Kushner during the first administration, coordinating with him during the pandemic on the delivery of ventilators to the US. The ventilators were provided by RDIF and caused concern among officials at the Treasury Department that the US might be violating its own sanctions, according to a senior US official.
When sanctions were imposed against Dmitriev by the US Treasury in 2022, he was described as a “known Putin ally”.
“He has leveraged his ties to universities and organizations in the United States to serve as a representative for the Russian president to American institutions, thereby providing access to key economic opportunities in the United States,” a statement at the time said.
In recent years, Dmitriev has appeared on various American television stations and at events like the World Economic Forum in Davos, to promote the strengthening of trade ties between the US and Russia. He pushed a similar message at the meeting in Miami, according to public readouts of the meeting.
Just last month, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described Dmitriev as a “Russian propagandist” in an interview about Trump’s sanctions against Moscow.
Tensions behind the scenes?
Despite becoming a Putin ally, it would appear Dmitriev is not universally popular among other members of the president’s inner circle.
Russian reports claim that the businessman clashed with foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and presidential aide Yury Ushakov when they met with American officials in Saudi Arabia back in February.
Before the first meeting between the two countries since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Putin told Lavrov that the delegation would only include himself and Ushakov, according to Agentsvo. In a separate meeting, he granted Dmitriev’s request to be part of the talks without informing his foreign minister.
When Lavrov was informed that the third seat was for Dmitriev, he reportedly moved the chair away from the table and said: “If he wants to take part, let Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin] tell me himself.”
