The Magician of the Kremlin - The Atlantic

For the past 18 months, Vladimir Putin’s efforts to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine have been led by a man with no diplomatic background or expertise. Kirill Dmitriev, a banker who is under sanctions for his role in financing the war, has been shuttling from Moscow to Florida to meet with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in and around the exclusive island known as Billionaire Bunker. His pitch during these rendezvous is that the United States should sell out Ukraine’s sovereignty in exchange for glittering billion-dollar projects for Russian and American companies—digging for precious minerals in the Arctic, say, or joint missions to Mars.<br>These fantasies are rooted in the idea that the Americans can be talked into ignoring some of the most salient facts about contemporary Russia. What sane investor would put long-term money into a country where the law is a facade, where the intelligence services can expropriate your business as soon as it looks profitable, and where another neo-imperial war might flip the chessboard at any given moment?<br>Putin chose Dmitriev for this job not only because of his reassuring American credentials—degrees from Stanford and Harvard Business School, work experience at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs—but because his profile matches that of his two main American interlocutors. He is an oligarch whose glamorous blond wife is close friends with Putin’s younger daughter. That makes him a virtual son-in-law of the ruler, and it may be the reason his real-estate holdings alone have soared from some $5 million to $100 million over the past decade.<br>But Dmitriev is more than just a gifted Kremlin illusionist. He is living proof that if you squint hard enough, you can blur out the difference between a free society and one ruled by fear. You can convince yourself that everything Ukrainians have been fighting for since 2014—democracy, civic rights, a European future—is meaningless.<br>Anne Applebaum: Putin’s war comes home to Moscow<br>Not so long ago, Dmitriev was making a very different pitch to Western investors. He was among the most prominent spokespeople for economic reform, a man who talked up Russia as a place where the rule of law would prevail, where corruption and Mafia tactics would be tamed, where foreign capital would be safe from the oligarchs. He wanted what the Ukrainians want.<br>Dmitriev seems to have willed himself to forget all of this, just as he has willed himself to forget that he was born and raised in Ukraine, and that some of his former schoolmates are among those fighting and dying on the front lines. And he wants Witkoff and Kushner and President Trump, and the rest of us, to forget it all too. If Alexei Navalny is the defining figure of what it takes to resist tyranny in our time, Dmitriev may someday be remembered as his opposite: the man who will do anything to stay close to power.

Matthew Murray, an American lawyer, recalls that Dmitriev approached him at the annual St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in 2011. Murray lived in Moscow at the time and was representing a nonprofit called the Center for Business Ethics and Corporate Governance, which he had co-founded a decade earlier.<br>Dmitriev wanted Murray’s advice. He had just been given the job of running a new sovereign wealth fund, and he wanted to hold it to the highest international standards, he told Murray. The fund would lead efforts to modernize and diversify the Russian economy away from its dependence on oil and gas, partly by investing in public health and manufacturing.<br>Luring big investors may have been Dmitriev’s primary motive. But he also seemed interested in improving Russia’s dilapidated roads, airports, and hospitals while making the system more transparent. He asked Murray if he would draw up a model ethics code for use at the new Russian Direct Investment Fund, saying that he also hoped to promote other Russian companies.<br>Dmitriev got some of America’s biggest private-equity figures to sign on as advisers: Stephen Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group, David Bonderman of TPG, and Leon Black of Apollo Global Management. One of the early joint investments with American firms was in a chain of well-run hospitals in Russia called Mother and Child.<br>Dmitriev wasn’t doing this because he was brave, or had principles. He preached economic reform because the wind was blowing that way. Everyone I spoke with about Dmitriev emphasized his sheer ordinariness, his bland charm, his ability to adapt to the moment. “He was so invisible,” one former business partner said (like many people who still have dealings with Russia, she asked for anonymity). Dmitriev appears to have had the full support of Russia’s then-president, Dmitry Medvedev, who was sitting in for Putin, and who often struck the same notes about honesty and transparency. Russia was on the verge of joining the World Trade Organization in 2011, an effort that had taken almost two decades.<br>In other words,...