Dmitriev, man behind the negotiations between Moscow and Washington

In the reopened dialogue in Saudi Arabia, a crucial role is being played by the head of the RFPI, the Russian Investment Fund, a ‘man in the shadows’ born in Ukraine, very loyal to the Russian president and a Stanford graduate. He has never broken off relations with Trump's entourage.

Moscow (AsiaNews) - In the negotiations that began in Saudi Arabia between Russia and the United States to reach peace and divide Ukraine and the whole world, a crucial character is at work in addition to Trump and Putin, Rubio and Lavrov: he is Kirill Dmitriev, a ‘man in the shadows’ who is very loyal to the Russian president, a Stanford graduate and head of the RFPI, the Russian Direct Investment Fund, a sovereign wealth fund established in 2011 by the Russian government to invest in companies in high-growth sectors of the Russian economy, as the negotiations are largely a global business issue.

Other members of the Russian delegation are certainly important too, such as Yury Ushakov, a great diplomat and former Russian ambassador to the USA, or Sergey Naryshkin, director of counterintelligence, who accompanied the foreign minister Sergey Lavrov to Riyadh. Lavrov has been in office since 2004, the second longest in the world after the Turkmen Rašid Meredov. Dmitriev, born in Kiev in 1975, studied in the USA from the end of high school in the ‘90s, after having met an American family in the still Soviet Ukrainian capital, who had arrived on a mission of ’ civil diplomacy’, which allowed him to do the necessary paperwork to enrol at Foothill College in California, before enrolling at Stanford University. As he himself recalls, “I was one of the very few foreign students, alone and without any relatives, who enjoyed a full scholarship for the entire university course”.

Dmitriev returned to Russia in 2000, during Putin's rise to power, and made a career for himself in various American companies such as Ibs and Delta Private Equity, a branch of the Russia-USA fund created by then-President Bill Clinton, which was declared an ‘undesirable organisation’ in 2015.

In 2007 he returned to his native Ukraine to organise the Icon Private Equity fund with a capital of one billion dollars, and then reported in Russia that ‘in my country the so-called democratic changes are underway, with a great increase in corruption that is eating everything, something must be done’, stimulating Putin to intervene.

Dmitriev then married Natalia Popova, a friend of Katerina Tikhonova, Vladimir Putin's youngest daughter, and both women now work in another financial foundation, Innopraktika, effectively creating a ‘family circle’ at the highest levels of the Kremlin.

In 2015 Dmitriev took over the leadership of the RFPI, financing Russia's most important chemical-petroleum complex, Subura, with over 3 billion dollars, and was defined as ‘Russia's most powerful lobbyist’.

It's no coincidence that during the negotiations in Saudi Arabia the Russians offered the Americans new access to oil reserves, perhaps allowing them to pass through the Arctic lands, which are also being divided between the two empires.

Dmitriev's job is to attract large investments to Russia, and despite three years of sanctions and isolation, he continues to extol the successes of his initiatives. A month ago, he reported at a meeting with Putin that the RFPI's turnover had exceeded billion, increasing the sums granted by the state for his operations by 5.7 times. It was Dmitriev who allowed the creation of the Sputnik V vaccine, the first in the world against Covid, enabling Putin to win the ‘pandemic war’ race, regardless of the real effectiveness of the product, which Dmitriev was the first to inject, boasting of its ‘perfection’.

As some employees of the RFPI say, ‘Kirill feels like a Messiah, who must carry out tasks of an evangelical nature for Russia and for the whole world’.

It is said that he was one of the main organisers of the interference in the 2016 US elections, the first election of Donald Trump, so much so that he was mentioned in the report of special prosecutor Robert Muller, who recalled that he was present at the 2017 inauguration alongside one of Trump's main sponsors, former Navy Seal Erik Prince, founder of the private military company Blackwater.

Dmitriev's relationship with Trump's entourage has never been broken, not even during the years of the war in Ukraine, and now he represents both parties in diplomatic meetings, to conclude a peace that is truly advantageous for his great friends, those who sit in the White House and the Kremlin.