By Yousef Saba and Gleb Bryanski
RIYADH/MOSCOW (Reuters) -Russian President Vladimir Putin’s special envoy Kirill Dmitriev said on Wednesday during a visit to Saudi Arabia that he expected the war in Ukraine to end within a year.
Dmitriev was speaking after meeting officials from U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration in the United States last weekend. His visit there followed an announcement that a summit between Trump and Putin in Budapest had been postponed.
“We are sure that we are on the road to peace and as peacemakers we need to make it happen,” Dmitriev, who is also the CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, told an investment conference in the Saudi capital Riyadh.
Asked whether peace in Ukraine was possible within one year, Dmitriev said: “I believe so.”
While in the U.S. Dmitriev said that Moscow and Washington were close to a “diplomatic solution” to the war.
Dmitriev is part of Putin’s negotiating team in talks with the U.S., alongside Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Putin’s foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov. In his public statements, Dmitriev has said he is focused on economic cooperation.
While Dmitriev was visiting the U.S., Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called him a “Russian propagandist” for saying in interviews with U.S. media that new U.S. sanctions on Russian oil firms would lead to higher prices at American gas stations.
Dmitriev said on Wednesday that Bessent’s remarks had played in his favour at home, where he has sometimes come under fire from Russian nationalists for seeking greater cooperation with the Trump administration and promoting peace with Ukraine.
“It was actually good for me because most people in Russia call me a ‘peace propagandist’ or sometimes even, God forbid, ‘President Trump’s team propagandist’,” Dmitriev said.
Dmitriev touted cooperation at the Riyadh conference between the United States, Saudi Arabia and Russia as the world’s top holders of natural resources, saying this would help make the world more secure.
“People are right now focused on the regional conflict that exists around Russia but we do not want it to escalate into a bigger conflict. And for that we have to do better than we have been doing, not worse,” Dmitriev said.
(Reporting by Yousef Saba and Jana Choukeir; Writing by Gleb Bryanski; editing by Guy Faulconbridge and Gareth Jones)
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