Europe
Putin envoy dangles business ties to lure US to Ukraine deal
Bloomberg News
February 27, 2025
Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, right, and Maria Medvedeva, the deputy CEO for external communication for the fund, walk across the Ritz Carlton hotel in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2025. (Baraa Anwer/AP)
Russia’s newest envoy has made his opening gambit: offer up the prospect of lucrative business deals to Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
Kirill Dmitriev launched his mission this week, posting on X platform for the first time in more than a decade to declare U.S.-Russia cooperation was “key to address world challenges.” Then he followed up with a video graphic depicting a joint mission to Mars with the U.S. and Saudi Arabia on what appears to be one of Musk’s SpaceX rockets.
The focus on Musk’s grand dream of conquering the Red Planet was no accident for President Vladimir Putin’s emissary for foreign economic cooperation. The one-time Goldman Sachs Group Inc. investment banker has one critical assignment — to get U.S. President Trump and top advisers like Musk hooked on prospects for major business deals with Russia as bait for ending the war in Ukraine on terms favorable to the Kremlin.
Dmitriev persuaded Putin to develop ties with Trump based on business opportunities and he’s been given a chance to shine, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions. The Kremlin saw an opening for such talks after Trump began demanding access to Ukraine’s mineral resources, the person said, asking not to be identified discussing internal matters.
Russia is “looking for ways to exploit what it sees as Trump’s ‘pragmatism,’ and whether a commercial approach will work with the businessmen in his team,” said Ekaterina Schulmann, a political scientist at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin. Dmitriev “fits into this concept as an investor and a facilitator who has known people from Trump’s entourage for a long time.”
Putin amplified this strategy when he offered to work with “our American partners” to mine Russia’s rare earth metals in televised comments this week. Russia has “an order of magnitude more resources of this kind than Ukraine,” he said.
He also offered to sell about 2 million tons of aluminum to the U.S. if Trump lifted import restrictions, and suggested Russian companies could form a joint venture with American counterparts for aluminum production in Siberia.
The U.S. and Russia are also eyeing joint projects in the Arctic and other areas, Dmitriev told journalists in Riyadh, according to Interfax. “Joint projects will allow us to be more successful,” he said.
A spokeswoman for Dmitriev declined to comment.
Russian and U.S. companies are interested in cooperation, but “there haven’t been substantive discussion of this matter yet,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday, according to the Interfax news agency. “There is a stated U.S. position — first a settlement, then the economy. Everything needs to be resolved in stages.”
Russia is now in competition with the deal Ukraine has struck with the U.S. for joint development of its natural resources. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is expected to travel to Washington to sign the agreement with Trump on Friday, offering a critical opportunity for face-to-face talks before a possible summit between the U.S. and Russian leaders.
“I’d like to buy minerals on Russian land too,” which has “very good” rare earth reserves, Trump told reporters at the White House Tuesday. “Look, it’s a great thing if we settle — it’s great for Russia too, because we can do deals there, they have very valuable land that isn’t utilized.”
Dmitriev, 49, who was born in Kyiv, has headed Russia’s sovereign wealth fund since 2011 and is married to a friend of Putin’s daughter. Educated at Stanford and Harvard, the former McKinsey & Co. Inc. consultant was sanctioned as “a known Putin ally” by the U.S. days after the start of Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
He emerged as a significant figure in Putin’s strategy for engaging with Trump during last week’s meeting of top U.S. and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia. While he wasn’t involved in the diplomatic negotiations, Dmitriev acted as point man in Riyadh to make the investment case with U.S. officials and journalists for improved relations with Russia, emphasizing the cost of lost business due to sanctions over the war.
Days later, Dmitriev was announced as the Kremlin’s envoy for developing “investment and economic cooperation” with Global South countries and the West, including the U.S.
To be sure, there are plenty of obstacles to U.S. business involvement in Russia even if the conflict comes to an end. Many western multinationals scrambled to exit Russia when the war broke out, rupturing decades of involvement in the market, while the Kremlin imposed tough haircuts on company sale values and seized the local subsidiaries of those trying to leave, undermining investor confidence.
Putin’s strategy toward Trump reflects his training as an agent in the Soviet KGB, which used similar “mirroring” techniques to gain the trust of recruitment targets, according to Maria Snegovaya, senior fellow with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Even before last month’s U.S. presidential inauguration, Putin “used phrases from Trump’s own rhetoric — for example, that the 2020 elections were stolen from Trump and that if Trump had been in power, the war in Ukraine would not have started,” Snegovaya said. “Now we are clearly seeing a continuation of the same approach.”
Dmitriev had previously been prominent internationally as the face of Russian state efforts to promote its Sputnik Covid-19 vaccine globally, which was funded by RDIF.
His case for involvement in engaging with the Trump administration strengthened with the Kremlin once Saudi Arabia emerged as the potential host for a renewal of contacts. He’d already proved his usefulness in Russian efforts over the past decade to deepen ties with the Saudis and has a strong rapport with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Dmitriev’s ties to Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler developed at a time when the crown prince was facing western scrutiny after the killing of columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. Dmitriev was one of the key guests at Saudi Arabia’s flagship investment summit shortly after Khashoggi’s death that was snubbed by global business leaders.
In 2019, Prince Salman awarded Dmitriev with the King Abdulaziz Second-Class Order of Merit, the highest award of the Kingdom. The Russian financier also accompanied Putin on his visit to Abu Dhabi and Riyadh in 2023.
During Trump’s first term, Dmitriev also used his Middle East connections to make contact with people close to the U.S. president. In 2016, the national security adviser for the United Arab Emirates introduced him to Rick Gerson, the chairman of Falcon Edge Capital. Dmitriev put together a U.S.-Russia “reconciliation plan” that Gerson gave to Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
The document was circulated to other top Trump officials who never followed up, Kushner told U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.
Trump’s deal-driven approach may remind Putin of his time in St. Petersburg when he was head of the city’s committee on foreign relations in the 1990s “and trying to sell everything he can,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a Moscow-based independent political analyst. “This suggests that Putin really wants to end the war,” he said.