Kirill Dmitriev — Vladmir Putin’s special envoy and head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund — is suddenly ubiquitous.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has been largely quiet since his maximalist negotiating approach with Team Trump failed. Moscow, presumably largely guided by Lavrov, after winning a concession on Tomahawk missiles, opted to continue Putin’s hardline demands for ending the war in Ukraine ahead of the proposed Trump-Putin summit in Budapest. NATO would have to admit that it was the root cause of the war. Kyiv would have to cede all of the Donbas, and the Armed Forces of Ukraine would essentially have to disband.
None of that is going to happen.
When Russia’s Plan A failed, Putin tried Plan B to get Team Trump’s attention. He did so by testing his latest wunderwaffe.
Trump was not amused. He said Putin’s testing of the Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile was “not appropriate.” Trump also backed out of the meeting in Budapest after Putin’s nuclear shenanigans.
In response, the U.S. Treasury imposed sanctions on Russia’s two largest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil. Putin’s oil and energy sector, already under attack by long-range Ukrainian deep strikes against refineries and pipelines, is Moscow’s lifeline to keep funding the Russian dictator’s special military operation in Ukraine.
A week later, Putin tried again. This time, he announced the testing of a nuclear-capable underwater drone codenamed Poseidon. Then yesterday, in response to Trump’s threat to resume nuclear testing, Putin ordered Kremlin officials to “submit plans for the possible resumption of [Russian] nuclear testing.”
Putin’s favorite weapon during the Biden administration was nuclear bluffing. Ditto now during Trump’s second term. Yet this nuclear Kabuki theater is not working on Team Trump.
Enter Dmitriev. Putin knows both he and Lavrov overplayed their hand. Dmitriev’s mission is to find a way back in from the cold. The Stanford- and Harvard-educated 50-year-old appears to have calculated that he can do so by reaching out to the U.S. far right. Fearmongering is his weapon. However, undermining U.S. military support and aid for Ukraine is his mission.
In pursuit of this, he recently met with Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), thanking her for supporting Putin’s ridiculous negotiating demands on Ukraine. He also taped a podcast with Lara Logan wherein he falsely claimed that Putin upholds “traditional [conservative] values.”
But intentionally targeting civilians in Ukraine is not conservative or liberal — it’s a war crime. Ditto for kidnapping Ukrainian children.
As Steven Moore, a former chief of staff on Capitol Hill and the founder of the Ukrainian Freedom Project told us, given “the collapse of Tucker Carlson, who has always been on message for the Kremlin, the Russians are looking for a new way to pretend that they care about America’s culture wars.”
Dmitriev, at least for now, has apparently been tasked by Putin to do just that. He did it again after Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the much-watched New York City mayoral race Tuesday night, when he posted that George Soros had been a key backer of his winning campaign. Later that same evening, he quote-tweeted the New York Post’s cover that was captioned, “On your Marx, get set, Zo!” while saying, “Good Morning, NYC Comrades!”
Not many people had on their Bingo card a Putin stooge warning Americans about a communist in sheep’s clothing. Yet here is Dmitriev, doing just that. Regardless of where you stand on Mamdani, Dmitriev’s goal was not to warn Americans about the NYC mayor-elect or about modern-day communists. Rather, his sole aim is to undermine U.S. support for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
In order to do that, Dmitriev must undermine growing Republican support for military aid to Ukraine. So Dmitriev is trying to do an end-run around Team Trump to court his conservative base. One way to bond with the American right is to warn about communists. Another is to make false claims about Russian conservative and religious values is another.
Especially given the resurgence of Republican support for U.S. economic and military aid to Ukraine.
As Moore noted in a recent Wall Street Journal op ed, Republican voter support had plunged to only 19 percent by March 2025. Now, it has rebounded to 47 percent among Trump voters.
Notably, as a poll Moore commissioned, Christian Republicans who attend church weekly are one of the key drivers accounting for renewed Republican support. They may be more fully appreciating that Ukraine is a deeply religious country and shares many of America’s core values. As Moore emphasized to us, “80 percent of Ukrainians identify as Christians. Baptists are the third largest Christian denomination in Ukraine after Orthodox and Catholics.” Roughly half of Ukrainians attend religious services at least once a month, compared to fewer than 10 percent of Russians, according to various sources.
Putin has hypocritically framed his war as a religious crusade, and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill declared Putin’s invasion of Ukraine a “Holy War” against a West that has “fallen into Satanism.”
Dmitriev is not fooling Team Trump. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly sent him packing after he he claimed new U.S. sanctions would have no effect on Russia’s economy.
Yet Dmitriev keeps trying. He seems to think he and Putin have seats at the table of where American culture wars are playing out. Americans of all political stripes should disabuse him of that notion by showing him the door.
Mark Toth writes on national security and foreign policy. Col. (Ret.) Jonathan Sweet served 30 years as a military intelligence officer and led the U.S. European Command Intelligence Engagement Division from 2012 to 2014.
