​When I first met Kirill Dmitriev he was one of the bright young things of the Russian business firmament that was going to build a new liberal, market oriented Russia.

With degrees from both Stanford and Harvard and fluent in English, he was working as part of the USAID funded financial reform team that included entities like Delta Credit Bank, supported by the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) and other US financial institutions, to introduce Western-style mortgage financing in post-Soviet Russia, which pioneered the country’s mortgage lending business. It took off in 2003 and was an off-the-chart success, spawning a massive industry that boomed in the noughties and led to a real estate boom. At the time surveys found that half of the entire Russian population wanted to jettison their Soviet-era housing and move to a better apartment. Delta Credit made that possible.

Dmitriev worked for Delta Private Equity that ran a programme to create a mutual funds business, launched by Boris Yeltsin in 1996 who created what are known in Russia as PIFs. These were big international funds like legendary investor Mark Mobius’ Franklin Templeton Investments that launched in Russia with expectations of a bonanza driven by the emerging middle class. Dmitriev was very active in the business and set up and headed the Russian Association of Direct and Venture Investment (RADVI) as a modern finance industry began to take shape.

Russia's future was looking bright and Dmitriev looked like the perfect person to bring the economy forward. Another rising star of that era was Arkady Dvorkovich, a Russian economist trained in Sweden, who started his career as an intern under “young reformer” Anatoly Chubais, who was running the Economics Ministry. He went on to become Russia’s First Deputy Prime Minister – number three in the hierarchy – but was eventually dropped and now spends his time running the chess federation. Dmitriev, however, has been catapulted into the heart of the Kremlin and is responsible for bringing tens of billions of dollars of investment into Russia from the Arab world.

They were heady times, but that effort came to naught after the economy collapsed in the summer of 1998, taking the stock market down with it. It lay moribund for at least five years until well after Russian President Vladimir Putin took over in 2000 and ushered in a decade-long boom.

Dmitriev continued to round out his experience with stints at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, both of which played active roles in helping build the financial industry. The Kyiv-born Dmitriev got frontline experience after he moved to Kyiv and became the manager of the Icon Private Equity fund in 2007, the private investment fund of Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk, President Leonid Kuchma’s son in law. Pinchuk is still about today as a leading Ukrainian businessman and holds a famous investment forum in Kyiv each year that attracts big business and international celebrities – a sort of Davos of Kyiv.

While at Icon, Dmitriev sold Delta Bank to General Electric, Delta Credit to Société Générale and shares of leading privately owned broadcaster CTC Media to Fidelity Investments.

But Dmitriev returned to Russian finance after he was offered the position of head of the Russia Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) in 2011, a multibillion-dollar wealth fund that was supposed to husband inbound foreign private equity investments for the Russian economy. Much of the so-called non-liquid assets in the National Welfare Fund (NWF) are RDIF investments. As a result of this job he also serves on the supervisory boards of Gazprombank, Rostelecom, Alrosa, Transneft and Russian Railways, earning around $2mn a year, according to a report by The Insider.

After his appointment was announced, Dmitriev and I met on Red Square to catch up and take some photos for a story about the fund I wrote for the Financial Times. He had high hopes for the fund and went on to arrange a series of meetings between Putin and some of the West’s biggest fund managers. The idea was to set up joint funds that RDIF would seed and start the investment ball rolling. Russia was still chaotic, the idea was that with RDIF’s backing the international managers got a krysha, the Russian world for roof, that would provide some measure of political support to protect their investments – similar to what the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) offers when it co-invests with private equity investors into projects in places such as Russia, as in addition to banking, it maintains useful connections at the highest level of government.

It didn’t work. The Western fund managers were still nervous and the 1998 collapse was still too fresh in their minds. Putin had not done enough to improve property rights or reform the judiciary to assure them they could protect a minority equity stake in a big Russian company, many of them controlled by oligarchs. Besides, the public market was booming, rising by about half each year during the boom years until the 2008 crisis struck.

Russia’s capital markets went through a revolution in 2012 when they were finally plugged into the international system after being hooked up to the international payments and settlement systems of Euroclear and Clearstream. Previously, international investors had to invest through accounts with the leading local investment banks like Steve Jennings’ Renaissance Capital, Ruben Vardanyan’s Troika Dialog or Charlie Ryan’s United Financial Group. After the Clearstream link was made, traders in London and New York could buy and sell Russian stocks and bonds from the comfort of their trading chairs in headquarters. Ukraine experienced a similar revolution when its local Ukraine’s Ministry of Finance federal treasury bond (OVDP) market was connected to Clearstream in May 2019.

Dmitriev and the Kremlin became frustrated at the lack of progress, but that all changed after one of Dmitriev’s managers, a Finnish former manager of a Swedish financial fund, took a flight to the Middle East and found he was pushing at an open door when he suggested that the Arabs come and invest in Russia.

Arab investment into Russia was pioneered by the region of Kazan. The deputy governor, a Muslim, was educated in Malaysia and brought some of his contacts to the Kazan Summit, a regional investment conference. Away from the rough and tumble of Moscow, but in a region the size of Europe, the Arabs began investing into things like a Halal meat processing factor and infrastructure. They felt at home in Kazan.

A mufti kicked the conference off each by reading prayers from the Koran and the Arabs liked being able to talk directly to the president of the Tatarstan autonomous republic Rustam Minnikhanov without getting bogged down in the intricacies of dealing with the Byzantine Kremlin power politics. Billions of dollars began to flow into Tatarstan from the Arab world. After the Kremlin realised what was going on and saw the amount of money flowing into Tatarstan, the Ministry of Finance started to send high level delegates to the Kazan Summit, which was also pointedly the venue for the most recent BRICS summit held at the end of last year. Kazan has become Russia’s portal to the Middle East.

After the tip-off, Dmitriev got on a plane and soon landed a deal with Mubadala, Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, as well as several others. The Arabs are very slow to start investing, but when they do, they invest big, a fund manager involved in managing the Mubadala fund told bne IntelliNews. The relationship quickly flourished. The private equity ball was finally rolling and for most of the last decade Dmitriev has been at the centre of these deals, selling shares, sitting on boards of joint ventures and directing sovereign wealth fund investments into a plethora of projects.

And this relation has produced some big favours for the Kremlin. In 2016, Russia was facing a fiscal crisis when the budget was missing some RUB2 trillion. The money was eventually found by rushing through the “privatisation” of a 19% stake in state-owned oil major Rosneft; except it came out later that the stake was not sold at all, but only used as collateral for a giant $10bn loan by the Qatar Investment Authority, the Qatari sovereign wealth fund.

Deeping Middle East ties

Russia's ties with the Middle East have only deepened in recent years as the business has flourished and it has come at a time when relations between the Middle East and the US have soured after the so-called shale revolution took off in 2016, turning America from a net importer of Arab oil to a net exporter and its main competitor.

This shift in allegiances was spotlighted in October 2017, when the King of Saudi Arabia, Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, made a historic visit to Moscow – the first-ever official visit by a reigning Saudi monarch to Russia. During the trip, King Salman met with Putin to discuss oil market cooperation, arms deals and economic investments. The visit led to several agreements, including a $1bn joint energy investment fund and preliminary discussions on Saudi Arabia purchasing Russia’s S-400 missile defence system. And Dmitriev played a central role in these negotiations as a de facto business ambassador to the Middle East.

Since then, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) has taken up the reins of Russian relations and has also been a frequent visitor to the country. He travelled to Moscow in 2018 to attend the World Cup opening ceremony and again in 2019 to attend the first Russia-Africa summit in Sochi. He has also met with Putin on several other occasions, including in Saudi Arabia and during OPEC+ meetings amongst other meetings.

The depth of these relations was revealed during the release of US former embassy employee and Moscow-based teacher Paul Fogel, who was swapped for a Russian cybercriminal jailed in the US this week and returned home.

US President Donald Trump didn’t send special envoy to Ukraine retired Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg to broker the release – a huge PR coup for the newly installed Trump – but his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, who has been doing business in the Middle East for decades and is also close to the authorities in several countries.

It has since emerged that MbS played a key role in brokering the deal, but upon his return from Moscow, Witkoff credited a Russian intermediary for facilitating the exchange. “There’s a gentleman from Russia, his name is Kirill, and he had a lot to do with this,” he told reporters. “He was important, he was an important interlocutor bridging the two sides.”

Fogel, who had been imprisoned on drug smuggling charges, returned to the US on February 11 aboard Witkoff’s private jet after the envoy personally flew to Moscow to retrieve him and reportedly spent three and half hours in conversation with Putin to broker the deal. In return, Washington released Alexander Vinnik, a Russian national convicted of money laundering through the cryptocurrency exchange BTC-e.

Witkoff, a real estate investor turned diplomat, has rapidly gained prominence in Trump’s foreign policy initiatives. He was instrumental in negotiating the January 2025 ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and has since been added to the team led by Kellogg tasked with establishing communication with Moscow to end the war in Ukraine.

Following his phone conversation with Putin this week, Trump revealed that the two leaders are planning to meet soon in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA).

Although it is not completely certain that the Kirill that Witkoff was referring to is Dmitriev, it is highly likely the same man.

Dmitriev has emerged in the last decade as one of the brightest rising Kremlin stars. He covered himself in glory when an RDIF investment into a coronavirus vaccine produced Sputnik V, the world’s first, and one of the most effective, vaccines in an extraordinarily short space of time.

RDIF went Full Monty on the production and distribution of the vaccine, selling it to emerging markets around the world at a time when the West was hoarding their own variants in what was widely seen in the Global South as “vaccine apartheid” and produced a lot of resentment against the West while greatly bolstering Russia’s international standing in the grateful emerging world. 

Despite the vaccine’s extraordinary success, it has still not been certified in Europe, over health concerns that the Kremlin claims are a mix of politics and lobbying by big pharmaceutical  companies in the West.

His wife, ice-skater Natalia Popova, is a former colleague of Putin’s daughter, Katerina Tikhonova, and later worked for her at her institute, the Russian press reports. Popova also famously kept a leopard as a pet.

Kirill Dmitriev's wife, ice-skater Natalia Popova, is involved in wildlife conservation and famously keeps a leopard as a pet. 

He has also previously served on the board of petrochemical giant Sibur alongside Tikhonova’s then-husband, Kirill Shamalov. One year on his birthday, he hired one of the mansions on Sparrow Hills that overlooks the river Moskva and then Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and most of the Moscow elite turned up to what attendees told bne IntelliNews was an opulent party.

Dmitriev has built on his ever-deepening relation in the Middle East and today RDIF has partnerships with sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar. But he has also retained relations with senior members of the previous Trump administration, reports Meduza. In 2017, he reportedly met with UAE officials and American businessman Erik Prince in the Seychelles, an encounter that later became a focal point of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in US elections.

He also has ties to Trump's son-in-law and former adviser Jared Kushner, who lives in an apartment in Washington that he bought from Dan Rapoport, a famous investor who made his money in Russia, but died in 2022 after he fell out of a window under mysterious circumstances.

While Dmitriev’s role in direct negotiations to release Fogel remains unclear, Meduza’s sources suggest he acted as a key facilitator, leveraging his existing connections to both Trump’s circle – particularly Kushner – and to Russian decision-makers. It was through Dmitriev, according to reports, that Witkoff was introduced to individuals capable of orchestrating both the prisoner exchange and Trump’s renewed dialogue with Putin, Meduza reports.

Dmitriev’s role in the negotiations is indicative of the deepening relations between Russia and the Middle East as Putin strives to build a multipolar world. But his transformation from bright young western-style investment professional to a Kremlin kingpin is also illustrative of the hybrid ZAO Kremlin economic model Putin is building in Russia, where the line between business and politics, a sacrosanct divide in Europe at least, is blurred; fund managers are diplomats and diplomats are fund managers. However, the same is increasingly true in the US, as both Trump and Witkoff have similar profiles to Dmitriev, but in Russia the mixing of roles is far more extreme.