The money man behind Moscow's 'peace plan' for Ukraine

When relations between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin soured in recent months, with the US president publicly 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 to Florida in late October, 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 the country's political and military sovereignty. The scheme, which surfaced last week, thrust Dmitriev back into the global spotlight, a position sources said he craves.

"Dmitriev is obsessed with being perceived as important," said one source, who has known him since the Moscow business scene of the late 2000s. 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 to some 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.