A Kremlin envoy on Thursday praised the Trump administration for hearing “Russia’s position on many issues” after two days of meetings in Washington that marked the first time in years that a senior Russian official had traveled to the United States for talks with American counterparts.
The envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, met in the White House on Wednesday with President Trump’s senior aide on Russia negotiations, Steve Witkoff, according to a U.S. official in Washington with knowledge of the talks.
Mr. Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and President Vladimir V. Putin’s special representative for investment and economic cooperation, said he held further meetings on Thursday “with key members of the Trump administration,” without identifying them.
He said he had discussed economic matters and claimed there was “a great desire by American companies to return to Russia.” He also said he had discussed “the possibility of cooperation on rare earth metals, in the Arctic and in various other sectors.” And he said Russia was working to restore direct flights to the United States, which banned Russian planes from its airspace after Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
“Of course, there are disagreements on various points,” Mr. Dmitriev, speaking in Russian, told reporters in Washington, according to a video of his remarks distributed by a Russian news agency. “But there is a process and a dialogue that, in our understanding, will help overcome these differences.”
U.S. officials did not immediately comment on the substance of the talks.
Mr. Dmitriev arrived in Washington with two aides on Tuesday, and he and Mr. Witkoff met in the White House on Wednesday afternoon, said the U.S. official. The two officials continued talking in the evening.
The talks appeared to be the latest step in Russia’s effort to improve ties with the United States. The rapprochement appeared to be hanging in the balance after Mr. Trump said last weekend that he was “very angry” at Mr. Putin for remarks that the Russian president had made on Ukraine.
Mr. Dmitriev’s visit came despite sanctions imposed on him by the Biden administration that described him as “a known Putin ally.” The meeting also took place as Mr. Trump excluded Russia from the roster of countries hit by the steep tariffs unveiled on Wednesday.
The Treasury Department suspended sanctions on Mr. Dmitriev for seven days to allow him to visit, and the State Department then granted him a travel waiver and a visa, said the person in Washington.
The White House National Security Council referred questions about the visit to the State Department on Thursday morning, and the State Department then referred questions to the White House.
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 a social media post earlier 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.”
Mr. Dmitriev did not say whether he had discussed the negotiations over the war in Ukraine between Moscow and Washington. Those talks appear to have run aground in recent days, after Mr. Putin rebuffed the proposal by Mr. Trump and Ukraine for a 30-day cease-fire.
But Mr. Dmitriev’s visit indicated that the Trump administration was continuing to reverse the Biden administration’s diplomatic isolation of Russia.
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.
