"Ruthlessly ambitious' Businessman who helped devise Ukraine 'peace plan'

When relations between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin soured this autumn, with the US president accusing Moscow of blocking a path to a peace in Ukraine and announcing significant sanctions against Russia's oil sector, one man saw an opening.

- Pjotr Sauer

Kirill Dmitriev, the US-savvy Harvard-educated head of Russia's sovereign wealth fund, boarded a plane in late October to Florida, where he met Steve Witkoff, the property developer serving as Trump's freelance envoy on Ukraine. The two men, neither of whom has any real diplomatic experience, began drafting a plan that would impose draconian terms on Ukraine and hand Moscow sweeping influence over its political and military sovereignty.

The scheme, which surfaced in media reports on Wednesday, has thrust Dmitriev back into the global spotlight - a position, several people who have met him over the years say, he has long craved.

"Dmitriev is obsessed with being perceived as important," said one source, who has known him since the Moscow business scene of the late 2000s. "He is ruthlessly ambitious... very thin on substance but exceptionally good at selling himself."

The source, like others, asked for anonymity so they could speak freely. "Fake it till you make it" was Dmitriev's modus operandi, the source said. "And he has, objectively, made it very far." It may come as a surprise that one of Moscow's most aggressive champions was born in Soviet-era Ukraine. The son of prominent scientists, Dmitriev grew up and studied at Kyiv's elite Lyceum No 145, a competitive maths and physics school where he made an impression on friends as a hardworking pupil who was obsessed with the United States.

"He was quite arrogant... but very systematic, and if he wanted to achieve something, he worked on that," said Volodymyr Ariev, who was in the same year as Dmitriev and is now a Ukrainian MP.