The Magician of the KremlinNEWS | 25 May 2026For the past 18 months, Vladimir Putin’s efforts to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine have been led by a man with no diplomatic background or expertise. Kirill Dmitriev, a banker who is under sanctions for his role in financing the war, has been shuttling from Moscow to Florida to meet with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in and around the exclusive island known as Billionaire Bunker. His pitch during these rendezvous is that the United States should sell out Ukraine’s sovereignty in exchange for glittering billion-dollar projects for Russian and American companies—digging for precious minerals in the Arctic, say, or joint missions to Mars.
These fantasies are rooted in the idea that the Americans can be talked into ignoring some of the most salient facts about contemporary Russia. What sane investor would put long-term money into a country where the law is a facade, where the intelligence services can expropriate your business as soon as it looks profitable, and where another neo-imperial war might flip the chessboard at any given moment?
Putin chose Dmitriev for this job not only because of his reassuring American credentials—degrees from Stanford and Harvard Business School, work experience at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs—but because his profile matches that of his two main American interlocutors. He is an oligarch whose glamorous blond wife is close friends with Putin’s younger daughter. That makes him a virtual son-in-law of the ruler, and it may be the reason his real-estate holdings alone have soared from some $5 million to $100 million over the past decade.
But Dmitriev is more than just a gifted Kremlin illusionist. He is living proof that if you squint hard enough, you can blur out the difference between a free society and one ruled by fear. You can convince yourself that everything Ukrainians have been fighting for since 2014—democracy, civic rights, a European future—is meaningless.
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Not so long ago, Dmitriev was making a very different pitch to Western investors. He was among the most prominent spokespeople for economic reform, a man who talked up Russia as a place where the rule of law would prevail, where corruption and Mafia tactics would be tamed, where foreign capital would be safe from the oligarchs. He wanted what the Ukrainians want.
Dmitriev seems to have willed himself to forget all of this, just as he has willed himself to forget that he was born and raised in Ukraine, and that some of his former schoolmates are among those fighting and dying on the front lines. And he wants Witkoff and Kushner and President Trump, and the rest of us, to forget it all too. If Alexei Navalny is the defining figure of what it takes to resist tyranny in our time, Dmitriev may someday be remembered as his opposite: the man who will do anything to stay close to power.
Matthew Murray, an American lawyer, recalls that Dmitriev approached him at the annual St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in 2011. Murray lived in Moscow at the time and was representing a nonprofit called the Center for Business Ethics and Corporate Governance, which he had co-founded a decade earlier.
Dmitriev wanted Murray’s advice. He had just been given the job of running a new sovereign wealth fund, and he wanted to hold it to the highest international standards, he told Murray. The fund would lead efforts to modernize and diversify the Russian economy away from its dependence on oil and gas, partly by investing in public health and manufacturing.
Luring big investors may have been Dmitriev’s primary motive. But he also seemed interested in improving Russia’s dilapidated roads, airports, and hospitals while making the system more transparent. He asked Murray if he would draw up a model ethics code for use at the new Russian Direct Investment Fund, saying that he also hoped to promote other Russian companies.
Dmitriev got some of America’s biggest private-equity figures to sign on as advisers: Stephen Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group, David Bonderman of TPG, and Leon Black of Apollo Global Management. One of the early joint investments with American firms was in a chain of well-run hospitals in Russia called Mother and Child.
Dmitriev wasn’t doing this because he was brave, or had principles. He preached economic reform because the wind was blowing that way. Everyone I spoke with about Dmitriev emphasized his sheer ordinariness, his bland charm, his ability to adapt to the moment. “He was so invisible,” one former business partner said (like many people who still have dealings with Russia, she asked for anonymity). Dmitriev appears to have had the full support of Russia’s then-president, Dmitry Medvedev, who was sitting in for Putin, and who often struck the same notes about honesty and transparency. Russia was on the verge of joining the World Trade Organization in 2011, an effort that had taken almost two decades.
In other words, Russia’s current degree of kleptocratic tyranny wasn’t necessarily preordained; the country might have moved in a somewhat more liberal direction. Dmitriev would no doubt have been very happy with that, and he would have been able to keep his American friends and investors.
But the protests that began in Kyiv in late 2013 seem to have touched a nerve with Putin. The dream of an open economy—what the Ukrainian protesters were demanding, and what Dmitriev was preaching in Moscow—was ever more clearly a threat to the Kremlin’s control of Ukraine and other former Soviet lands, because that control depended on maintaining a rigged system dominated by Moscow-friendly oligarchs.
So Putin made his choice. After he annexed Crimea and began sending his proxies into eastern Ukraine, the United States and the European Union imposed sanctions. That scared off the illustrious Western advisers at the Russian Direct Investment Fund, and Dmitriev’s moment as an apostle of ethics and transparency came to an end.
He then deftly retooled the RDIF into a political vehicle that would serve two purposes for Putin: placating oligarchs at home and charming autocrats abroad. Dmitriev became a frequent visitor to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, where he persuaded Mohammed bin Salman and Mohamed bin Zayed to pledge billions in investments to the RDIF. The fund provides almost no information about its investments, so whether any of its projects made money is impossible to know.
It may not have mattered. For the Emiratis, the largesse “was about political overlay and optics more than money,” a source familiar with the Emirati leadership’s thinking but not authorized to speak about it publicly told me. “The idea was partly to put some guardrails on the Iranian regime, via Russia and China.” In other words, the Emiratis hoped that investing substantial money into those two countries—which have important relationships with Iran—might lead them to restrain Iran from harming Emirati interests.
That did not pan out. Instead, Russia provided Iran with targeting information on U.S. military assets in the Middle East during the recent war. Most of these are located in the Gulf countries.
Back home in Russia, Dmitriev was dutifully transforming the RDIF from a vehicle for economic reform into a slush fund. In 2015, it moved $1.75 billion of pension money from Russia’s National Welfare Fund to Sibur, a petrochemical giant controlled by oligarchs, including one who was Putin’s son-in-law at the time. Later, Dmitriev shared information about the fund’s upcoming deals with that same son-in-law, according to leaked documents published by the Latvia-based Russian reporting platform iStories.
Dmitriev was becoming part of the Putin family circle. His wife, the TV presenter and onetime model Natalia Popova, is both a friend and a business associate of Putin’s daughter Katerina Tikhonova, who is listed alongside her on the boards of a number of companies. That may help to explain Dmitriev’s sudden acquisition of a large personal fortune: According to an investigation by Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, his $100 million in real estate is far more than what he has made from his salary and board positions.
By 2016, Putin trusted Dmitriev so much that he sent him on a diplomatic mission that had nothing to do with finance. On the day after Trump’s election, Dmitriev flew to New York, where he planned to attend the World Chess Championship final. On the way, he sent a series of urgent texts to George Nader, a Lebanese American political fixer and convicted sex offender who had strong ties to the Trump campaign.
Dmitriev texted that if there was “a chance to see anyone key from Trump camp,” he “would love to start building for the future.” In another text, Dmitriev writes: “My boss sends you his warmest regards.” He meant Putin. The trip went well, and two months later—still before the inauguration—Dmitriev sat at a hotel bar in the Seychelles, talking to Erik Prince, the Blackwater founder and Trump ally, about how the United States and Russia could drop their differences and make money together.
We know about Dmitriev’s texts because they were published in 2019 in the Mueller report on Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. That high-profile investigation put a damper on Dmitriev’s efforts, but he never lost Putin’s confidence.
In 2020, Putin assigned Dmitriev to lead the production and export of Sputnik, Russia’s COVID vaccine. A financier with no experience in public health was an odd choice for that position. Dmitriev worked hard on a flashy publicity campaign, with very mixed results. Sputnik was ultimately provided to several dozen countries, but its rollout was plagued by accusations of profiteering and broken promises. In a number of countries in Africa, Asia, and South America, Dmitriev gave exclusive distribution rights to a brand-new company, registered in the United Arab Emirates to a member of the Dubai ruling family, which made a fortune by doubling the price for each dose. The government of Ghana canceled a contract to buy Sputnik amid accusations of corruption and nondelivery of doses; Kenya blocked use of the vaccine for similar reasons.
When Trump regained the presidency in 2024, Putin again sent Dmitriev—now part of his inner circle—to the United States. Dmitriev had prepped for his reentry by adopting an online persona that was pure MAGA: frequent snarky posts on X about the idiocy of the “globalists,” obsequious praise of Trump and Elon Musk. His pinned tweet as of this writing is a link to an interview on Fox News in which he declares that the Trump team “stopped World War Three from happening.”
This time Dmitriev was working on a larger canvas: He was in effect Russia’s lead diplomat on the “peace talks” with which Putin hopes to advance his takeover of Ukraine. Dmitriev appears to have had a hand in drafting the 28-point plan that Trump urged Volodymyr Zelensky to sign last November, and that would have required Ukraine to cede large territories to Russia and drastically shrink the size of its army. The icing on this cynical proposal was Dmitriev’s specialty: a host of “mutually beneficial corporate opportunities” for the United States and Russia.
Dmitriev has an unusual qualification for leading these diplomatic talks, though it is one he rarely ever mentions: He grew up in Kyiv, the son of prominent scientists. The family was not rich, but Dmitriev’s father, a cell biologist, held high positions in the Communist Party of Ukraine in the 1980s. Two former friends at the Kyiv Natural-Scientific Lyceum No. 145—one of the most competitive secondary schools in the former Soviet Union—told me that Dmitriev was likable, if a little arrogant. He was a good student and athlete who stood out mainly for his ambition.
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“He talked all the time about how to get away from this gray Soviet reality and get a good education in the U.S.A.,” said Volodymyr Ariev, who was in the same class and is now a member of Parliament.
Dmitriev’s family connections got him a place on a school trip to the United States, where he later returned and spent almost a decade, earning his degrees from Stanford and Harvard before moving to Moscow in 2000.
Dmitriev’s father still lived in Kyiv in early 2022, when the Russian army was massing on the Ukrainian border. Many prominent people in Ukraine and Russia—including Zelensky—thought Putin was bluffing. It may be a measure of Dmitriev’s closeness to the Russian leader that he was not fooled. A few days before the invasion, his father abruptly left the country, most likely at his urging, according to neighbors of the family who spoke with the Ukrainian channel TSN last year.
When I spoke with Dmitriev’s former classmates, I thought they would express some surprise at what has happened to their old friend. Instead, they responded with a weary familiarity. “We have a name for people like this,” Ariev said. The word—yanichar—originated centuries ago, when the Ottoman officials who controlled parts of what is now Ukraine would kidnap boys to indoctrinate and train in the imperial capital before sending them back as men to crush local rebellions by their former compatriots. “Traitor” is probably too weak a translation.
Oleksandr Lisnichenko, another former classmate, said that one of Dmitriev’s closest childhood friends was seriously wounded at the front. That friend refused my request to speak.
“He said, ‘I don’t want to talk about Kirill,’” Lisnichenko told me. “‘I just want to shoot him in the knees.’”Author: Robert F. Worth. Source
