Russian envoy Dmitriev seeking to shield $280B in frozen assets – Ukrainian intelligence
Oleh Ivashchenko, chief of Ukraine's Foreign Intelligence Service, said this in an interview with Ukrinform.
"Take, for example, Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund and the Russian president's special representative for economic cooperation with foreign countries, who is lobbying for issues of global commerce. Dmitriev's prime task is to unlock the Russian sovereign assets frozen in foreign jurisdictions worth $280 billion – a huge amount of money for them," Ivashchenko said.
He added that Dmitriev is trying to shift the focus of the U.S. away from the war in Ukraine.
Oleh Ivashchenko
"Dmitriev is seeking to persuade the U.S. to push the war and peace issues aside and focus instead on a wider perspective. He says: we have the Arctic, we have oil, gas, we have Siberia with its huge resources. You need rare earth minerals? Let's look what we can offer here. And it ultimately turns out that the Ukrainian issue is being washed out, relegated to the background," Ivashchenko added.
He stressed that, in this context, "our goal is to make it so that the Ukrainian issue is the focus of the agenda."
In April 2025, Russian special envoy Kirill Dmitriev met in Washington with Trump's special representative, Steve Witkoff. The meeting focused on ways to strengthen U.S.-Russia relations amid renewed diplomatic engagement between the two countries.
