READ HERE: Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, has become a key figure in the Kremlin’s outreach to the Trump administration.
Russian President Vladimir Putin appointed the 49-year-old Kyiv native as special envoy for economic affairs in an attempt to interest Washington in joint economic ventures in return for a favorable peace deal.
Dmitriev, who earned degrees from prestigious U.S. universities and has experience in dealing with the American business world, seems an ideal choice for the task.
Kyiv-born, Harvard-educated financier
Dmitriev was born in Kyiv in 1975 in Soviet Ukraine. His father, Oleksandr, is a well-known Ukrainian biologist working at the Institute of Cell Biology and Genetic Engineering of the National Academy of Sciences.
Dmitriev’s education and professional debut perfectly positioned him as an up-and-coming member of Russia’s technocratic elite.
At the age of 14, Dmitriev was one of the first Soviet exchange students to travel to the U.S., where he studied at Fооthill College in California. He went on to graduate with honors from an economics program at Stanford University and received his MBA at Harvard.
Launching his business career abroad, Dmitriev worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Company in Los Angeles, Moscow, and Prague, and as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs.
He then moved to Moscow in 2000 to become the deputy CEO of the IT company IBS at the age of 25. Dmitriev’s business associates saw the Harvard-educated financier as an example of Russia’s new business class after the economic downturns of the 1990s.
Speaking to Kommersant at the time, IBS founder Anatoly Karachinsky singled him out as “one of the best” repatriates coming to Russia after working for the “largest American companies.”
Dmitriev’s professional career later included a position at Delta Private Equity Partners, created under the U.S.-Russia Investment Fund. Between 2007 and 2011, the businessman lived in Ukraine, where he headed Icon Private Equity of Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk.
In Ukraine, Dmitriev advocated for closer ties between his former and current homeland, saying in the media that Ukraine’s renunciation of ties with Russia would result in an “economic starvation.”