Umair
A Kremlin envoy said on Thursday that he was meeting with the Trump administration in Washington this week, the first time in years that a senior Russian official was known to have traveled to the United States for talks with American counterparts.
The envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, is the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and President Vladimir V. Putin’s special representative for investment and economic cooperation.
He said on the Telegram messaging app on Thursday that he had met with “representatives of the administration of President Donald Trump” on Wednesday and would do so again on Thursday.
There was no immediate comment from the Trump administration about Mr. Dmitriev’s post.
Mr. Dmitriev’s visit came despite sanctions imposed by the Biden administration that described him as “a known Putin ally.” It also came as President Trump excluded Russia from the roster of countries hit by the steep tariffs unveiled on Wednesday.
Mr. Dmitriev did not specify whom he was meeting with, but his main known American counterpart in recent weeks has been Steve Witkoff, the close friend of Mr. Trump who is the White House envoy for the Middle East and Russia.
Mr. Dmitriev, a 49-year-old former banker who studied at Stanford and Harvard and worked at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, has emerged as a key emissary for Mr. Putin in the Kremlin’s efforts to build a close relationship with Mr. Trump.
Mr. Dmitriev’s message, tailored to Mr. Trump’s pecuniary mind-set, has been that the United States stands to profit from closer ties with Russia.
In February, Mr. Dmitriev worked with Mr. Witkoff to help broker a prisoner exchange that led to the release of Marc Fogel, an American teacher imprisoned in Moscow.
In talks with Mr. Witkoff and other American officials in Saudi Arabia days later, Mr. Dmitriev claimed that U.S. companies had incurred $324 billion in losses by pulling out of Russia after Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Mr. Dmitriev said in his social media post on Thursday that his meetings were about restoring the U.S.-Russian dialogue. The relationship had been “completely destroyed under the Biden administration,” he wrote, and the United States could benefit from cooperation “in international affairs and in the economy.”
“A real understanding of the Russian position opens up new opportunities for constructive interaction, including in the investment and economic sphere,” Mr. Dmitriev said.
He made no mention of the negotiations over the war in Ukraine between Moscow and Washington. Those talks appear to have run aground in recent days, with Mr. Putin having rebuffed the proposal by Mr. Trump and Ukraine for a 30-day cease-fire.
Mr. Trump said last weekend that he was “very angry” over some of Mr. Putin’s comments about Ukraine, raising the possibility that the American president could drop his efforts to rebuild ties with Russia.
But Mr. Dmitriev’s visit indicated that the Trump administration was continuing to reverse the Biden administration’s isolation of Russia on the diplomatic stage.
In another sign of continuing engagement between Washington and Moscow, Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, said this week that preparations were underway for a second round of talks aimed at easing the work of American and Russian diplomats operating in each other’s countries.
U.S. and Russian officials first met in Istanbul on Feb. 27 for talks on unwinding years of tit-for-tat restrictions that reduced the American mission in Russia and the Russian mission in the United States to skeleton staffs.
“We can see signs of progress and our U.S. partners’ willingness to lift these obstacles to the normal work of diplomats in our respective capitals,” Mr. Lavrov said.
