A Kremlin envoy on Thursday praised Trump’s administration to hear “Russia’s position on many issues” after two days of meeting in Washington that marked the first time a senior Russian official had traveled to the United States.
The envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, met at the White House on Wednesday with President Trump’s senior assistant in Russia’s negotiations, Steve Witkoff, according to a US official in Washington with knowledge of talks.
Mr Dmitriev, head of the Eximal Sovereign Fund and Russian President and President Vladimir V. Putin’s special representative for investment and economic cooperation, said he had further meetings on Thursday “with key members of the Trump administration” without Trump.
He said he had discussed financial issues and claimed that there was “a great desire from US companies to return to Russia”. He also said that he had discussed “the possibility of working on rare earth metals, the Arctic and in various other areas”. And he said that Russia worked to restore direct flights to the United States, which banned Russian planes from airspace after Mr Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
“Of course, there are disagreements at various points,” Mr Dmitriev told Russian, to Washington reporters, according to a video of his observations distributed by a Russian News Agency. “But there is a process and a dialogue that, in our understanding, will help to overcome these differences.”
US officials did not immediately comment on the substance of the talks.
Mr Dmitriev arrived in Washington with two assistants on Tuesday and he and Mr Witkoff met at the White House on Wednesday afternoon, the US official said. The two officials continued to speak in the evening.
Talks seemed to be the last step in Russia’s attempt to improve links with the United States. The approach of the approach seemed to be hanging in balance, after Mr Trump said last weekend that he was “very angry” to Mr Putin for observations made by the Russian president in Ukraine.
Mr Dmitriev’s visit came despite the sanctions imposed by Biden’s administration that described him as “a well -known ally of Putin”. The meeting also took place as Mr Trump excluded Russia from the list of countries affected by the abrupt invoices revealed on Wednesday.
The Treasury suspended sanctions on Mr Dmitriev for seven days to allow him to visit and the Foreign Ministry then gave him a changing exemption and a view, the man told Washington.
The White House National Security Council said questions about a visit to the Foreign Ministry on Thursday morning and the Foreign Ministry then refers to questions to the White House.
Mr Dmitriev, a 49 -year -old former banker who studied at Stanford and Harvard and worked for McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, has emerged as a key envoy to Mr Putin in Kremlin to build a close relationship with Mr Trump.
Mr Dmitriev’s message, adapted to Mr Trump’s financial mind, was that the United States is to benefit from closer ties with Russia.
In February, Mr Dmitriev worked with Mr Witkoff to help fund an exchange of prisoners that led to the liberation of Marc Fogel, an American teacher imprisoned in Moscow.
In talks with Mr Witkoff and other US officials in Saudi Arabia days later, Mr Dmitriev claimed that US companies had been losing $ 324 billion, pulling from Russia after Mr Putin’s invasion.
Mr Dmitriev said in a social media position earlier on Thursday that his meetings were to restore US-Russia dialogue. The relationship was “completely destroyed by the Biden administration”, and the United States could benefit from cooperation “in international affairs and the economy”.
Mr Dmitriev did not say if he had discussed the negotiations on the war in Ukraine between Moscow and Washington. These talks seem to have run in recent days, after Mr Putin has rejected the proposal by Mr Trump and Ukraine for a 30 -day cease.
However, Mr Dmitriev’s visit showed that Trump’s administration continued to reverses the diplomatic isolation of Biden’s Biden administration.
In another sign of the ongoing commitment 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 facilitating the work of the US and Russian diplomas.
Americans and Russian officials first met in Constantinople on February 27th on talks on the years of restrictions that reduced the US mission to Russia and the Russian mission to the United States to the skeleton officials.
“We can see the signs of the progress and willingness of our US partners to lift these obstacles to the regular work of diplomats in our respective capitals,” Mr Lavrov said.
