Kirill Dmitriev is not a professional diplomat.

But the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth has emerged as a key player in drafting a new proposal to end Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine.

That is perhaps no surprise: A former investment banker, Dmitriev has increasingly served as a back-channel communicator between the Kremlin and allies of U.S. President Donald Trump, despite being on the U.S. sanctions list.

Dmitriev was born in 1975 in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, then part of the Soviet Union. In his youth, he took part in a school exchange program in the U.S. and went on to study at Stanford University as an undergraduate, according to a biography published by Russian state media outlet TASS.

By 2000, he had graduated with an MBA from Harvard Business School. Later, he worked with U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs and consulting firm McKinsey & Company, according to a profile on the World Economic Forum’s website.

But despite this early start in the world of New York finance, Dmitriev would cement his reputation while working in private equity firms in Russia and Ukraine.

In 2011, when the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) was created, Dmitriev was appointed CEO. As head of the sovereign wealth fund, he represented the country on the global stage, working closely with a number of large Western firms as he sought to attract foreign investment to Russia.

He became known as a savvy negotiator with a more modern touch than the older, Soviet-trained diplomats at the top levels of Russia’s Foreign Ministry, said political analyst Anton Barbashin.

Dmitriev was particularly successful at negotiating closer financial ties between Russia and countries such as Saudi Arabia.

And he may be particularly suited to diplomacy with the Trump administration.

"He's sort of a - you may say - a different generation person who understands the American society, American style of business better," explained Barbashin.

Dmitriev also has connections to the Putin family. Dmitriev’s wife, Natalia Popova, is deputy director of Russian nonprofit Innopraktika, which is headed by the president’s daughter, Katerina Tikhonova.

In 2022, in the wake of Russia’s military operation , the U.S. placed on both Dmitriev and the RDIF under sanctions.

At the time, the U.S. Treasury described the banker as “a close associate of Putin.”

In February 2025, Dmitriev was named Russian special presidential envoy on foreign investment and economic cooperation.

In his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections, special counsel Robert Mueller said that Dmitriev met with Erik Prince, a major Trump donor and the founder of controversial security firm formerly known as Blackwater, in January 2017, as Trump was preparing to take office and the Russian government was seeking contacts with the incoming administration.

In an interview with Russian news outlet RBC in 2020, Dmitriev acknowledged that he had engaged in “various discussions on how to improve relations between Russia and the United States,” while brushing off any suggestion of wrongdoing.

Any proposal he may draft with Witkoff or any other U.S. official would still need to be approved by the Kremlin — and almost certainly would be heavily edited in the process.

"Dmitriev would never be the one negotiating the final document. He is the one who helps get the discussion going," says Barbashin.

Putin would have the final say, according to Barbashin.