He sold the Russian Coronavaccin to the world and mediated in the exchange of prisoners. According to American media, he was appointed by Putin on Friday as a negotiator about peace in Ukraine. 49-year-old Kirill Dmitriëv, director of the Russian investment fund RDIF And a family friend of Putin, has made a career spurt in ten years. “You can solve almost every problem via Kirill Aleksandrovich,” say people who know him. Now the long, balding investor can put his teeth in the Ukraine issue.
Kirill Dmitriav was born in Kyiv in 1975 and left for the United States at the age of fourteen, where he studied at Stanford University and the Harvard Business School. After his education, he started working at the Bank Goldman Sachs and consultancy firm McKinsey. In 2000 he returned to Moscow, where he According to the Russian research site The Insiderfound a job at an American investment fund. From 2007 he worked in KYIV at the Investment Fund Icon Private Equity of the Ukrainian Oligarch Viktor Pintsjoek, son-in-law of former President Leonid Koetsjma.
However, DMITRIJV owes his glorious career in first place to his marriage to the glamorous Natalia Popovaformer fellow student and best friend of Putin’s youngest daughter Katerina Tichonova. Popova is, among other things, vice-president of Tichonova’s tech organization ‘Innopraktika’, ombudsman for tech issues and presenter. The 38-year-old Tichonova, who, like her older sister Maria, takes a different last name than her father, was married until 2018 to the Russian billionaire Kirill Sjamalov, whose father was good friends with Putin. Tichonova is now according to media reports For a few years now together with the Russian ballet dancer Igor Zelensky, with whom she had a child in 2017.
Foreign Investors
Thanks to the good relationship with Putin’s daughter, Dmitriëv lucrative functions got at Russian companies, including oil company Sibur, Gazprombank, the Russian Railways and Diamantbedrijf Alrosa. In 2011, DMITRIJV became director of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF). The fund, worth (then) 10 billion dollars, aimed to attract foreign investors. In an interview From 2012 in a Russian business magazine, DMITRIJV said that he had brought investors from dozens of countries to Russia for introduction to President Putin himself. In 2021, his wife became a member of the Supervisory Board of a bank affiliated with the RDIF.
The ‘Fixer of the Kremlin’ likes to perform a show, as an anonymous source told The Insider in 2023. For example, during difficult negotiations he would like to be called by high-ranking Kremlin officials and thereby put the phone on the speaker. “After such phone calls, bewildered business partners often no longer ask any questions and agree with everything,” The Insider quoted a source from Dmitriëvs Cirkel. “It is very difficult to make an appointment with him, you have to call his wife or friends,” said another.
The rest of the world became acquainted with him during the Coronapandemie, when his RDIF decided to invest in a coronavaccin under the name Sputnik V. Initially, the Russian vaccine, which was only a few dozen people were skepted up, was tested and was tested and was tested refused on the European market. Nevertheless, DMITRIJV in particular succeeded in convincing non-Western countries of the vaccity of the vaccine. Thanks to a successful lobby and many interviewsRussia was able to profile itself as a ‘savior’ of poorer countries, who fished behind the net among Western vaccine producers.
Familiar with Trumps world
DMITRIJV speaks English fluently and knows Trumps business thinking world like no other. How good his relationship is with the Americans became clear in 2016 with Trumps first election victory. In 2018 it turned out that DMITRIJV had traveled to the Seychelles shortly after Trumps for a meeting with Erik Prince of the American security firm Blackwater. According to American media, the encounter is intended to explore conversations between Trump and Putin. Although Prince denied, there was proof of the encounter according to The Washington Post Formed in the study of the then American special prosecutor Robert Mueller to Trumps Russian connections.
His versatility, negotiating tactics and excellent contacts make DMITRIJV an ideal candidate for the negotiations. In 2019, Dmitriëv played a role in the release of the Russia caught in Russia, American investor Michael Calvey, for whom he said he was personally in. In February 2022, just after the Russian invasion, he and his RDIF put on the American sanction list.
Mid -February Dmitriëv’s name came to the surface In the exchange of the American teacher Marc Fogel against the Russian money laundering criminal Aleksandr Vinnik, in which the Saudi crown prince Bin Salman was also involved. Trumps Middle Eastern envoy Steve Witkoff spoke praising words about Dmitriëv: “There is one gentleman In Russia called Kirill and who was an important mediator and has done a lot to bring the two sides together. ” Trump wants a ‘deal’ over Ukraine. With Dmitriëv, Putin seems to have found the man who can forge such a deal.