Kirill Dmitriev, the Russian playing the US from within

Like the good product of the Soviet era he is, Dmitriev, whose wife is besties with Putin’s daughter, has learned to play the west from the inside, exploiting egos, vanity and the respect that comes with good tailoring. This is the Kremlin’s velvet saboteur: a man who combines Stanford-Harvard credentials with a sewer of conspiratorial obsessions and who has spent months, even years, cultivating gullible or willing Americans such as Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, JD Vance and his coterie, including army secretary Dan Driscoll, and useful idiots like Rep. Anna Paulina Luna. Dmitriev uses them to launder a Russian surrender plan as “peace”.

His most willing instrument has been Witkoff, the “World’s Worst Diplomat”, profiled in these pages back in April. An American of Russian heritage, Trump’s golfing buddy and “ambassador-at-large” for Ukraine and Gaza or anything going, Witkoff is, as the investigative journalist Michael Weiss put it, Trump-world’s “Dim Philby”. He is a cheerful, intellectually overmatched businessman always making deals and through whom a far cleverer figure has smuggled Russia’s maximalist demands into the centre of American diplomacy.

The past week’s maelstrom can be traced to a single meeting: Dmitriev, Witkoff and special advisor and presidential son-in-law Kushner huddled last month in Miami. It was there that the trio drafted what became the now-notorious 28-point plan: a document still bearing the stiff, unnatural phrasing of a direct Russian translation, instantly recognisable in Moscow’s bureaucratic cadences. 

On X, insiders christened it the “DimWit Plan”. During Dmitriev’s Miami trip, as reported by Reuters, Dmitriev also convened a meeting at the Faena Hotel, a property owned by Soviet-born US-UK billionaire oligarch Len Blavatnik, Witkoff’s close business partner in Florida and a man sanctioned by Ukraine. Dmitriev’s guest at the meeting was a pro-Moscow Florida Republican named Anna Paulina Luna. She was filmed receiving a box of chocolates bearing Putin’s face.

Rubio wasn’t told of the Miami huddle’s outcomes – the State Department was bypassed. Ukraine was also excluded. After the story leaked, Trump was finally briefed and according to the Washington Post barely understood it. 

Despite this lack of understanding, Trump seized on the possible deal, barking out a Thanksgiving ultimatum demanding Zelensky “sign by Thursday” and then lashing out that Ukraine and the president were showing “zero gratitude”.

And then it descended into farce. Witkoff, trying to DM someone about the leak of the 28 point plan, instead replied publicly on X: “He must have got this from K.” It was deleted minutes later, but the confession was permanent and suggested clearly that Kirill Dmitriev wrote it, leaked it, and used Dim Philby to deliver it.

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Born in Kyiv in 1975, Dmitriev as a teenager spoke warmly about Ukrainian independence including on a trip to the US, but he has long since insisted he is a son of the Soviet Union, and not Ukrainian. Repackaged through elite American education and finance – Ivy League campuses, Goldman Sachs, McKinsey – he returned to Moscow as a US finishing school princeling. But the worldview beneath the post-Soviet veneer is unmistakably revanchist.

His X feed is a torrent of Occidental-decline fantasies and conspiratorial narratives: the BBC as a “warmongering machine”; London on the verge of civil war; Keir Starmer as a “mumbling, stumbling puppet”; racist and antisemitic “white genocide” myths popularised by Elon Musk; Deep State coups (one of his obsessions – he frequently posts Trump’s own QAnon-coded videos); Ukrainian “Nazis”, globalist brainwashing and resuscitated Soviet tropes about Western “colour revolutions”. 

He praises Hungary’s Viktor Orbán as Europe’s only sane leader: “Hungary remains a voice of reason & peace in Europe. EU warmongers continue to live within Biden’s false narrative of endless war… exposing the globalist, brainwashing media machine.” He sneers that the EU is committing “civilisational suicide”, and idolises Nigel Farage, Tommy Robinson, Russophile conspiracy ogres RFK Jr, Oliver Stone; and of course the messiah of MAGA, Charlie Kirk. 

And he wants to be noticed. When I observed on X how similar Musk’s apocalyptic rhetoric on Europe sounded to his Kremlin agitprop posts, Dmitriev leapt into my replies untagged. “Actually, @JDVance was the first to call out Europe’s ‘civilizational suicide.’ So with him and @elonmusk, we’re in great company…”

His hypocrisy is as blatant as his propaganda. He rails against western degeneracy while reportedly enjoying a luxury property in Courchevel, and interests in Antibes. When Musk’s platform briefly displayed approximate user locations in recent days, Dmitriev’s account suddenly appeared to be posting from France. He owns apartments in the UAE and villas stretching across continents — a portfolio estimated at more than €80m. 

According to Novaya Gazeta and the FBK anti-corruption investigators, his empire now includes at least 14 additional properties, some held through elaborate offshore structures. He is married to Natalya Popova, the close university friend of Putin’s daughter Katerina Tikhonova, the kind of connection that explains perhaps much about his soaring influence.

Incredibly, Dmitriev still holds the Légion d’honneur, awarded by Emmanuel Macron in 2018 and never revoked, even as he wages hybrid war on France. When Moscow pushed its deranged cocaine disinformation op against Macron, Starmer and Germany’s Friedrich Merz in May, Dmitriev enthusiastically amplified the doctored footage, hinting Macron was concealing “sugar – or something else.” 

The Élysée denounced the smear as Kremlin fakery. Dmitriev carried on. This past week he again smeared Britain’s prime minister: “UK & EU warmongers are the least popular leaders in the history of their countries. Chaos leaders. Chaos should not stand in the way of peace.”

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Dmitriev didn’t magically arrive at the Miami table. He has long haunted the edges of western power. The Mueller Report into Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election chronicled his attempts to establish back-channels to the Trump team in 2016–17. He met American business figure and Blackwater founder Erik Prince in the Seychelles to discuss a US-Russia reset.

He used Rick Gerson, a close Kushner friend, to send a “reconciliation plan” to the incoming administration, and he sought to position himself as a private bridge between Trumpworld and the Kremlin. Mueller found no criminal coordination, but documented Dmitriev’s deep interest in shaping US policy from the shadows.

His modern influence began with a breach so clichéd and bumbling it would embarrass Le Carré – or James Bond. Earlier this year, the Trump administration granted Dmitriev a special sanctions waiver, making him the first sanctioned Russian official admitted to Washington since 2022. Witkoff then invited him to dinner at his private home, an intelligence atrocity so severe that, according to Reuters, it “set off alarms” inside the White House and state department. 

Photos emerged of an infamous gathering including Mike Waltz, Rubio and Steve Witkoff (“Ukraine is a fake country and Putin a gracious guy”), feting Putin’s messenger even as the Russian president ordered more massacres of Ukrainians with missiles.

Two nights later, Witkoff was in the Oval Office telling Trump that the fastest way to peace was to give Russia Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, the very territories Moscow failed to seize outright.

Those demands never died. They returned again last week, having mutated into something even more outrageous. Bloomberg and the Financial Times reported that Dan Driscoll, US army secretary and Vance’s Yale friend, flew to Kyiv to push the Dmitriev plan as a Washington ultimatum, alerting shocked EU and Nato ambassadors that Trump had “run out of patience” and that Ukraine “had to sign by Thursday.” 

European leaders at the G20 in Johannesburg (a summit Washington conspicuously skipped) scrambled into emergency bilaterals. Poland’s prime minister Donald Tusk wrote pointedly on X: “Before we start our work, it would be good to know who is the author of the plan and where it was created.”

They soon had the answer: a sanctioned Kremlin envoy and a Trump golfing partner drafted it in Miami.

Not everyone in Washington has been as credulous as Witkoff or as eager as Moscow-parrot Vance and his backers like Trump’s AI and crypto czar David Sacks to push Kremlin interests. In late October, treasury secretary Scott Bessent spoke bluntly after Dmitriev appeared on US television insisting “no pressure works on Russia.” 

Bessent, asked why Dmitriev downplayed sanctions, replied: “Are you really going to publish what a Russian propagandist says? I mean, what else is he going to say?” On Capitol Hill this week, a lucid minority agreed. Republican senator Mitch McConnell condemned the 28 point “peace” plan as one that “rewards the aggressor and punishes the victim.” Senators Mike Rounds and Jeanne Shaheen said Marco Rubio told them directly that the document was “a Russian proposal, not our recommendation”, before Rubio began the inevitable backtracking.

The fallout from the frenzy around the “DimWit” plan for Ukraine’s capitulation has emboldened the Kremlin’s most rabid ideologues. Alexander Dugin, Putin’s apocalyptic mystic “brain”, greeted Dmitriev’s plan with a declaration that Ukraine would be “absorbed” into Russia within two years, complete with Moscow-written textbooks, mass “rehabilitation” programmes, the renaming of seized regions as “Old Lands” and the abolition of what he called a “Russophobic dialect.” This was not commentary; it was genocide in future tense.

Dmitriev’s swagger has reportedly even angered the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, who is said to be jealous of the special envoy’s diplomatic double-play and his habit of outranking Moscow’s official channels. Bessent is right to deride him as a propagandist. In another era we would not hesitate to call this what it is: an intelligence operation inside western politics that is steering the west into a crisis, engineered in Moscow, with astonishing ease.

Despite his charlatan Christian nationalist Bible-bashing theatrics on X, citing Jesus and insisting that “blessed are the peacemakers”, Dmitriev is no such thing. Nor is he a diplomat or mediator. He is a banker and geo-political arsonist with Ivy League diction, a Kremlin agent of chaos and destruction advancing Putin’s goals while enriching himself and the American business operatives he deals with.

Unless western governments stop letting themselves be Kirilled, Dmitriev and his boss in Moscow will keep scripting the next chapters, in mostly immaculate and occasionally AI-generated English. Europe will keep sleepwalking toward its next Munich. The sovereignty and survival of Ukraine will be the first major victim.