EditThe looter with an MBA who wants to downsize Ukraine
Kirill Dmitriev’s wheeling and dealing is the world’s most cynical business consolidation disguised as diplomacy
There’s a particular type of Russian operator who emerges only when the Kremlin needs something delicate, deniable, and profitable. These men are not generals, nor diplomats, nor ideologues. They are dealmakers in bespoke suits — lubricants in the machinery of geopolitical coercion. And at the very top of that quiet caste today stands Kirill Dmitriev, writes Sed Tkachuk.
Volodymyr (Sed) Tkachuk is a communications specialist and free-lance journalist, signing Sed Tkachuk. His other columns can be found here.
Officially, he’s the CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund. Unofficially, he’s the Kremlin’s crisis manager, its financial consoler-in-chief, and now the co-author of a 28-point “peace plan” for Ukraine that looks less like diplomacy and more like a leveraged buyout of a sovereign country.
Dmitriev presents himself as the ultimate cosmopolitan operator — Stanford MBA, Davos circuits, private-equity polish, the reassuring cadence of Western financial jargon. But behind this polished veneer lives a man who rose precisely because he is not gentle, not soft, and absolutely not guided by moral consideration. Putin does not elevate tender souls to run his sovereign wealth fund; he elevates liaisons who can execute pressure, opportunism, and deals soaked in cynicism.
And Dmitriev delivers. He always has.
To understand the 28-point plan he co-authored with Trump’s favourite real-estate whisperer Steve Witkoff, you must understand what Dmitriev really is: not a diplomat, but an ingenious financial broker. The type who approaches geopolitics the way a PE firm approaches a distressed asset — strip, flip, and profit.
Right now, the behemoth of the Russian economy is feeding on war. It is profiting from war. Its energy model, its budget, its elites — all of them gorge on the conflict. They are satisfied with the price — 25–30 thousand compatriots a month killed and hopelessly maimed. But even gluttons get full. And when the war ends, the Russian war-economy monster will require supplemental feeding to keep it satisfied and quietly napping after yet another oversized meal.
This is where Dmitriev’s brilliance — and danger — comes in.
For Putin, he is the architect of the postwar feast. For Ukraine, he is the broker of a trap.
Dmitriev understands perfectly what a post-war Russia needs: new access, new markets, new Western softness and qualified slaves from Ukraine. Not peace — but stability on Moscow’s terms.
He has the right contacts, the right Western backchannels, and the right elite Rolodex to shape whatever Ukraine-shaped sausage the Kremlin wants packaged and handed to the world as “compromise.”
But Dmitriev’s style is such that sooner or later, he’ll sell out these masters and American partners too.
And while people talk endlessly about mines, rare-earth deposits, and black soil, the real prize is far larger: Russian influence consolidated; Western hesitance institutionalised; Ukraine fragmented into bite-sized administrative zones where Moscow’s leverage becomes permanent.
If Dmitriev delivers Putin’s non-negotiable “peace”, he guarantees smooth business sailing for sanctioned oligarchs — he fixes the oil-sanctions bottleneck, he reopens pipelines of legitimacy, he turns territorial conquest into capital mobility, and he positions Russia as a dominant geopolitical actor for decades to come. Not through force, but through contracts, arbitration clauses, and investment frameworks that outlive sanctions and administrations.
He will become the architect of a new order, a model for the oligarchs of the Western world.
It is the world’s most cynical business consolidation disguised as diplomacy.
Embedded deep in the plan is a requirement to slash Ukraine’s military in half — to 600,000. In abstract terms it looks like a concession. In real terms it is the single most dangerous clause. For Europe as well.
Ukraine’s army is not simply its army — it is Europe’s only fully combat-tested, modern-warfare-competent military. It is backed by field engineers, university research labs, weapons innovators, and wartime industrial knowledge the rest of Europe simply does not possess.
Weakening Ukraine’s armed forces isn’t “peace.” It’s marinating the target for the next invasion.
If Russia attacks another neighbour — and it will — the first call for help that country will make is not to Brussels, nor Berlin, nor Paris. It will be to Ukraine’s general staff.
Dmitriev’s plan seeks to destroy that option.
Here is the heart of the matter and the most important conclusion:
The 28 points were blackmail, not an agreement. Russia cannot win militarily, so it resorts to coercion — recruiting American politicians hungry for deals with Moscow. Europe has already stated that any cessation of hostilities must be rooted in international law, aligned with the continent’s security, and must guarantee that Russia does not attack again after a pause. This is why the agreement collapsed on all sides. Russia never intended to sign it. It was a psychological operation — a political shakedown disguised as diplomacy. And Russia will keep doing this. It will seek new American and European politicians, tempt them with joint ventures, dangle Arctic projects and energy profits, all to undermine support for Ukraine. The decisive moment now is December 18th, when the EU must decide whether continued financing for Ukraine will proceed, because Ukraine’s budget is exhausted by March.
This is the moral and strategic core the world must confront.
One of the strangest and most revealing silences in Kyiv is the collective unwillingness to mention Dmitriev’s father — a man still working in Ukraine, renewing his leave every 90 days, untouched by sanctions, unmentioned in press briefings, invisible in parliamentary debates. Ukrainian officials who dissect drone routes and refinery ownerships with forensic zeal suddenly lose all curiosity here.
That silence is as curious as the leak itself.
In high-stakes negotiations, what is not said often matters more than what is.
Dmitriev also has one more story in Ukraine.
Residential development with the name of Olympic Park, began like every glossy real-estate dream of late-2000s Ukraine: billboards, TV ads, promises of schools, clinics, and a perfect suburban life. Amid the financial boom, buyers rushed in — reassured by the names behind the project, including Delta Bank’s Mykola Lagun and, crucially, Kirill Dmitriev, who claimed to own 30%. His PR presence, his polished financier reputation, even celebrity-backed ads made ordinary professionals feel safe trading life savings for a house that seemed guaranteed.
Then the facade crumbled. Construction stalled, and out of 900 promised cottages barely a hundred skeletal shells appeared. No utilities, no infrastructure — only vanishing managers and recycled excuses. Investors like serviceman Oleg Khavruk, who sank $250,000 into the project, were left chasing Dmitriev, who ducked responsibility, hid from meetings, and eventually shuffled the ruins to “new owners” suspiciously identical to the old team.
And just as his investors were drowning, Dmitriev’s own star rose. By 2011, while families fought lawsuits and developers disappeared, Vladimir Putin appointed him head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund — a sovereign mega-fund trusted with billions. The man who couldn’t deliver a single functioning housing project in Ukraine was suddenly rebranded as Russia’s immaculate financial prodigy.
Seen in retrospect, the pattern is unmistakable: Dmitriev never builds; he exits. Olympic Park didn’t tarnish him — it launched him. He left furious Ukrainians and collapsed contracts behind, stepping smoothly into higher power. It’s the same logic at play today in his 28-point “peace plan”: a polished broker who sells hope, evades accountability, and moves upward while others pay the price.
The only encouraging development is that Europe has finally stepped up. Macron, Merz, Starmer, Stubb, Carney, von der Leyen — all now sitting at the table, reshaping the conversation, diluting the poison, blocking the most catastrophic concessions. Europe has stopped waiting for American sanity. It has realised that its own security rests not in appeasing Trump or flattering Witkoff, but in preventing Dmitriev from rewriting the map of the continent.
Kirill Dmitriev is not a negotiator.
He is not a mediator.
He is not a peacemaker.
He is a business consolidator with geopolitical reach and vampire’s appetite.
A crisis-manager for autocracy.
A man whose Western polish hides a profoundly Russian worldview: peace is merely a transition period between profitable wars.
And unless Europe — and America — treat him as such, they will wake up inside the deal he quietly designed for them.
Caption: Russia’s top economic negotiator Kirill Dmitriev (L) attends a meeting between the presidents of Russia and the UAE at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, 07 August 2025. EPA/ALEXANDER NEMENOV / POOL
Updated: December 1, 2025 - 07:37
