Vladimir Putin’s top negotiator shared a video of himself casually wake-surfing off the Florida coast ahead of Sunday’s crunch talks between President Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky.
Kirill Dmitriev — the Harvard-educated special envoy and head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund — shared the video, along with the caption, “Miami spirit,” on X, in response to a post by Ukraine’s deputy foreign minister Sergiy Kyslytsya announcing he had arrived in south Florida.
Putin’s crony later shared a picture of himself on a balcony in Florida showing off the provocative t-shirt he wore during the video.
The white tee, emblazoned with Russia’s national emblem and the slogan, “Next time in Moscow,” referred to Putin’s invite to President Trump at the end of their joint press conference in Alaska in August.
Dmitriev also shared a picture of Trump and Putin shaking hands at previous talks, as he described Sunday as an “important day on the path to peace,” in a post on X.
“Great leaders, honest dialogue, peacemakers and the world should win. Warmongers and tricksters should repent. Let the path to peace prevail,” he wrote.
He later shared details of President Trump’s phone call with Putin ahead of Sunday’s peace talks.
Dmitriev, 50, previously spent three days with Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff in Miami, after the pair first met in February this year, when Putin’s envoy played a role in securing the release of an American teacher from a Russian prison.
“There’s a gentleman from Russia, his name is Kirill, and he had a lot to do with this. He was important. He was an important interlocutor bridging the two sides,” Witkoff told reporters at the time.
Born in Soviet Ukraine, Dmitriev took part in a student exchange program in 1990 in New Hampshire, later returning to the US as a college student, where he studied at Stanford before earning an MBA at Harvard and later working for McKinsey in Los Angeles, BBC News reported.
Although previously critical of Putin’s crackdown on the oligarchs in 2003, he came to be increasingly hostile toward Ukraine.
As well as working in diplomacy, he has previously suggested ambitious joint commercial projects between Moscow and Washington.
Dmitriev has proposed joint US-Russia energy projects in the Arctic, as well as partnering Russia’s sovereign wealth fund with US companies in developing rare earth deposits.
He’s also called for Russia to offer Elon Musk “a small-sized nuclear power plant for a mission to Mars,” and, most ambitiously of all, an $8 billion “Putin-Trump” rail tunnel linking Russia and the US under the Bering Strait.
As a result of his support for Ukraine’s occupiers, Kyiv has slapped Dmitriev with sanctions for alleged crimes against the nation.
