The Kremlin is assembling a high-level negotiating team to engage in direct talks with the United States to end the war in Ukraine, sources with knowledge of the issue have told CNN.
Members of the Kremlin team have not been publicly announced, but CNN has learned it will include top-level political, intelligence and economic figures, including the Russian official who played a key behind-the-scenes role in a recent US prisoner release deal.
Kirill Dmitriev, a close Putin adviser, will focus on restoring economic ties between the US and Russia as the two sides attempt to forge a Russia-Ukraine peace agreement, according to sources with knowledge of the appointment.
Recently, Dmitriev worked closely with US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff – and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia – to secure the release from Russia of American teacher Marc Fogel, sources familiar with the deal told CNN.
“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 CNN on Wednesday.
Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sanctioned sovereign wealth fund, has been an outspoken Trump supporter from within Russia’s political elite, saying his US presidential election victory “shows that ordinary Americans are tired of the unprecedented lies, incompetence, and malice of the Biden administration.” He added that Trump’s win “opens up new opportunities for resetting relations between Russia and the United States.”
Born in Soviet-era Ukraine and educated at Harvard and Stanford in the US, Dmitriev worked as consultant at US consultancy firm McKinsey and as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs.
The Kremlin’s inclusion of Dmitriev, indicates that a key focus of Russia’s negotiating strategy in likely to be on sanctions reduction, as well as on repairing battered economic ties with the West.
Dmitriev has been a prominent Russian contact point with both the first and current Trump administrations, consistently calling for closer US-Russian ties, and engaging in private back-channel talks with US officials.
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Dmitriev was sanctioned by the US Treasury Department, which designated him a “close associate of Putin” and his family.
