Vladimir Putin’s heavyweight team for negotiations to end Russia’s war in Ukraine has decades of experience in high-stakes negotiations. It also includes a prominent member who has been under US sanctions.
Kirill Dmitriev, a financier educated at Stanford and Harvard with ties to the Russian president’s own family, may play a key role as an unofficial back-channel with Donald Trump’s negotiators, people familiar with the preparations told Bloomberg.
Others in the team include Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s chief Kremlin foreign-policy advisor, who has more than half a century of involvement in diplomacy, and Sergei Naryshkin, who served with Putin in the Soviet KGB, the report added.
The Russian President seems to be opting to rely mostly on highly skilled and experienced negotiators to represent Russia. The personnel choices underscore just how determined the Russian leader is to secure a favorable outcome in any negotiations and potentially how little his demands about Ukraine have changed in the three years since he ordered the full-scale invasion.
The addition of Dmitriev, with his experience in the US and with firms like McKinsey, and Goldman Sachs Group is said to be because of his familiarity with the United States.
Dmitriev is sanctioned by the US, who called him “a known Putin ally” when announcing the penalties.
Yuri Ushakov, 77, has served as Vladimir Putin’s aide for more than a dozen years and before that was an ambassador to the US from 1998-2008, lending him a deep knowledge of dealing with Washington. His knowledge of the American establishment gives him an edge.
Sergei Naryshkin, 70, is a longtime confidante of the Russian leader, having worked with him for more than four decades.
Naryshkin told reporters on Thursday that the Kremlin had already ordered continued contact with US special services after Wednesday’s call between Trump and Putin, the state-run Tass news agency reported.
Both Ushakov and Naryshkin were involved in early ceasefire talks with Ukraine shortly after Russia started its full-scale invasion in 2022.
Kirill Dmitriev, 49, was already involved in negotiations to free the American school teacher Marc Fogel from a Russian prison. Dmitriev was born in Kyiv, and after his stints with McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, he returned to Russia to work at a private equity fund. He’s run Russia’s sovereign wealth fund since 2011.
He is married to a close acquaintance of Putin’s younger daughter, and the two women worked together at an innovation center. Outside Russia, he might be best known as the lead promoter of Russia’s Covid-19 vaccine, Sputnik V.
Other members of the 2022 negotiating team may also rejoin efforts at a later date. They would mainly help in any talks with Ukrainian representatives, according to a person close to the Kremlin, and could include presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky.
