(Reuters) -President Vladimir Putin on Sunday appointed Kirill Dmitriev, the chief of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, as a special envoy on international economic and investment cooperation.
A presidential decree announcing the appointment of Dmitriev, considered the most U.S.-savvy member of Russia’s elite, comes after the highest-level U.S.-Russia talks since Russia sent its forces into Ukraine in 2022.
Dmitriev, 49, is an investment banker who studied at Harvard and Stanford in the 1990s and worked at U.S. firms Goldman Sachs and McKinsey before returning to Moscow in the early 2000s.
Along with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Kremlin foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov, Dmitriev participated in the talks, which took place last week in Saudi Arabia’s capital Riyadh.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, Moscow’s point man for relations with the United States, said that a new Russia-U.S. meeting at the level of departmental heads would take place at the end of the week.
The wealth fund said separately that Dmitriev’s new mandate will include ties with the United States.
The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) said in a statement that Dmitriev “will continue to develop investment and economic cooperation with both the countries of the Global South and Western nations, including the United States of America.”
The appointment will give Dmitriev a more formal role in the Russian negotiating team.
Putin currently has about 25 special envoys on various geographical areas and issues, who report to him directly. Dmitriev and RDIF are under U.S. sanctions.
Dmitriev was involved in negotiations for the release from prison this month of U.S. teacher Marc Fogel, according to a Reuters source.
Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff was quoted by CNN as saying a “gentleman from Russia” named Kirill had a lot to do with the deal, under which the United States is also releasing a jailed Russian.
Dmitriev ran the U.S. capital-backed private equity firm Delta Equity Partners in Russia before being appointed by Putin to head the RDIF, which was created in 2011 to facilitate foreign investment in Russia. He played a role in early contacts between Russia and Trump’s team after Trump was first elected president in 2016, as well as in building Russia’s relationship with Saudi Arabia, which led to an OPEC+ oil price agreement.
Dmitriev has met several times with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who also played a role in setting up the Riyadh meeting. Dmitriev had a separate meeting with the crown prince after the talks in Riyadh.
(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Will Dunham)
