After negotiations between US and Russian representatives concluded in Riyadh last week, one member of the Moscow delegation remained behind closed doors for an informal one-on-one meeting with the host of the historic talks, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
It was Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia's sovereign wealth fund, who was photographed smiling and talking to the kingdom's leader.
A former Goldman Sachs banker educated in America who at the time held no official diplomatic position, Dmitriev seemed an unexpected figure in the negotiations alongside more conventional members of the Russian delegation, such as Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
However, the American team stated that it was Dmitriev, in his unofficial role as Russia's mediator with the Gulf and due to his long-standing relationship with the Crown Prince, who played a key role in preparing these talks.
Dmitriev has remained connected to the world of international finance and is a regular guest at the Kremlin. He works closely with sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East. It was previously reported that he had contacts with key people in Donald Trump's circle.
“We were contacted by someone from Russia, someone you know. Kirill,” Steve Witkoff, a member of the US delegation, told Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, at a public panel after the talks in Riyadh. “This was facilitated in large part by His Highness Mohammed bin Salman.”
He did not specify that it was Dmitriyev. The head of Russia's sovereign wealth fund credited Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump for organizing the talks and declined to comment on any role he may have played in the process.
Witkoff said that the Saudis' assurances then led to his trip to Russia in early February and the release of American detainee Mark Fogel. "They convinced us that this was real, that Kirill's words had weight and that what he was saying could come true," Witkoff said.
Last week, Dmitriev was officially appointed as Vladimir Putin's special envoy for investments and economic cooperation with foreign countries.
Dmitriyev, 49, has led the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) since its creation in 2011 as a mechanism to attract international investment to Russia. Since RDIF was focused on US investment in its early years, Dmitriyev is ideally placed to lead the Kremlin’s new $10 billion investment fund.
Born in Kiev but educated at Stanford and Harvard in the US, Kirill Dmitriev has worked at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs in his career. For much of the 2000s, he worked at Delta Private Equity in Moscow, a branch of a US sovereign wealth fund set up to channel private American investment into Russia.
However, after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and a series of sanctions - including those against the state-owned development bank VEB, under which the fund was originally established - Western interest in investing in Russia has declined significantly. Several Wall Street billionaires and prominent asset managers have withdrawn from the RDIF's advisory board.
The focus then shifted to other markets, and Dmitriev increasingly participated in Moscow's negotiations with Gulf countries, including talks on regulating oil prices through OPEC+.
“Politics and deal-making went hand in hand,” said one former RDIF employee, adding that “for the Saudi side, he was always number one.”
“He played an important role as a mediator between the various actors in the Gulf monarchies,” said Alexandra Prokopenko, an expert at the Carnegie Endowment. “He knows the sheikhs, he knows who has what resources and what their interests are.”
By 2022, when Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, sovereign wealth funds from the Middle East accounted for more than two-thirds of all sovereign investments in Russia, according to an analysis by Global SWF.
However, the structure of RDIF's affairs, about which Dmitriev personally reports to Putin, has never been fully disclosed.
Dmitriev was also among those in Moscow who worked behind the scenes to secure the release of Michael Calvi, a major American investor in Russia, after his arrest in that country.
Dimitriyev's business dealings with the Gulf also brought him into contact with people in Trump's circle, according to US special counsel Robert Mueller's report on alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Mueller's report said Dmitriev used his contacts in the United Arab Emirates, a country that invests in RDIF, to establish contact with the first Trump administration. The special counsel did not conclude that those contacts led to any illegal actions.
Asked whether his contacts with key people around Trump contributed to the meeting in Riyadh this month, Dmitriyev said they did not and declined to comment further. “All I can say is that, if you look back, historically I have always been in favor of developing relations between the United States and Russia,” Dmitriyev said.
Dmitriev told the Financial Times that negotiators have set up a special parallel channel that, in addition to political talks, will focus on business agreements. “Within the Russian delegation, I am responsible for economic investment projects and bridge building,” he said.
Dmitriev also has close ties to Putin's family. His wife, Natalya Popova, is deputy director of Inopratika, the technology foundation of Yekaterina Tikhonova, Putin's younger daughter. Dmitriev was also a board member of a large petrochemical company where Tikhonova's then-husband was a senior executive.
Former RDIF employees say that while he was building his international network, Dmitriev was a “very strict manager” and a “perfectionist” at home.
"All the horrors you can find in books about the lives of Wall Street interns, we experienced," said one former employee, who asked to remain anonymous in order to speak freely about his former employer. "People got burned... Life was brutal."
Putin also entrusted him with several other key projects, including during the Covid pandemic, when Dmitriev, whose parents were biologists, took on the role of the main promoter and one of the key people in the development of the Russian Covid-19 vaccine.
Dmitriev was so proud of the Sputnik V vaccine that he and his family got vaccinated with it. He also, according to two people he spoke to, asked his associates to explore the possibility of nominating scientists who worked on the vaccine for the Nobel Prize.
Last Monday, Dmitriev launched an account on the X network to celebrate his new role as special envoy to the negotiating team. “Russia is open,” he wrote, alluding to the possibility of new business ties between the US and Russia.
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