After Russia’s total invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Kirill Dmitriev was sanctioned by the US Treasury Department, which considered him a “close collaborator of Putin” and his family.
Russia’s top economic envoy arrived in the United States for “official” talks, just days after President Donald Trump announced tough new sanctions against Russia, sources with knowledge of the visit told CNN.
According to the sources, Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian sovereign wealth fund (RDIF) and special Kremlin envoy, is expected to meet with Trump administration officials “to continue discussions on the US-Russia relationship.”
The visit comes amid growing US frustration with the Kremlin’s refusal to end the war in Ukraine and after Trump said he had “cancelled” a planned summit with his Kremlin counterpart, Vladimir Putin.
Dmitriev — who has been a prominent Kremlin advocate for closer economic cooperation between Russia and the United States — recently proposed building a “Trump-Putin” tunnel between Alaska and the Russian Far East.
Born in Soviet-era Ukraine and educated at Harvard and Stanford in the USA, Dmitriev worked as a consultant at the American consulting firm McKinsey and as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs.
After Russia’s total invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Dmitriev was sanctioned by the US Treasury Department, which considered him a “close collaborator of Putin” and his family.
The Treasury Department wrote in 2022 that “Putin and his inner circle of cronies have long relied on RDIF and Dmitriev to raise funds abroad, including in the United States.”
In April, Dmitriev became the first Russian official to visit Washington, D.C., since Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine. At the time, his visit – during which he met with Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff – was seen as an important step in relations between the Kremlin and the White House, which were then warming up.
The US government temporarily lifted sanctions against Dmitriev to allow the State Department to grant him a visa to enter the US, a source revealed to CNN in April.
