Sanctions are working: Putin urgently sent his chief economist for talks with Trump

According to insiders, it is expected that the head of the Russian Sovereign Welfare Fund (SWF) and special representative of the Kremlin, Kyrylo Dmitriev, will meet with representatives of the Trump administration "to continue the discussion of relations between the United States and Russia. " The visit comes against the backdrop of growing US dissatisfaction with the Kremlin's unwillingness to end the war in Ukraine and Trump's announcement to cancel a planned summit with Putin in Budapest.

On October 22, the Trump administration imposed sanctions against the two largest Russian oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil, calling on Moscow to immediately cease fire in the war with Ukraine. Vladimir Putin hastily declared that the sanctions would have little effect on the Russian economy, calling them an attempt to pressure Moscow. "No self-respecting country ever does anything under pressure," he said on October 23.

The Russian president said that in a conversation with Trump, he warned that the sanctions would affect global oil prices, particularly in the United States. Kirill Dmitriev, who has been a prominent Kremlin supporter of closer economic cooperation between Russia and the United States, recently proposed building a Trump-Putin tunnel between Alaska and the Russian Far East.

Born in Soviet times in Kyiv, Kyrylo Dmitriev, who was educated at Harvard and Stanford in the USA, worked as a consultant at the American consulting firm McKinsey and as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. His father is a world-renowned biologist. Oleksandr Dmytriev is the long-term head of the Plant Immunity Laboratory of the Institute of Cell Biology and Genetic Engineering of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

Dmitriev is married to Natalia Popova, a Russian businesswoman and daughter of oligarch Oleksandr Popov. The couple has a son. Popova is a classmate and close friend of the youngest daughter of the Russian dictator, Kateryna Putina (Tikhonova). Dmitriev was among contacts with Trump during his first term in the White House. In 2017, he was Putin's unofficial representative in contacts with the administration of the US president.

After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Dmitriev was sanctioned by the US Treasury Department, which called him a "close associate of Putin" and his family. In April, Dmitriev became the first Russian official to visit Washington since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. At the time, his visit, during which he met with Trump's special representative Steve Witkoff, was seen as an important step in the then-warming relations between the Kremlin and the White House.