The special envoy of the Russian President Kirill Dmitriev arrived in the United States for "official talks" two days after US President Donald Trump announced sanctions, CNN reported, citing sources familiar with the visit.
Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund and a special envoy of the Kremlin, is expected to meet with representatives of the Trump administration "to continue discussions on US-Russia relations," the sources said.
Axios reports, citing its own sources, that Dmitriev will meet with the US President's special envoy Steve Witkoff. They said the meeting would take place this weekend in Miami.
The visit comes amid growing US discontent with the Kremlin's refusal to agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine and Trump's announcement that he would cancel the expected summit with Vladimir Putin in Budapest, which the US president announced a week ago.
Dmitriev recently proposed building a "Trump-Putin" tunnel between Alaska and the Russian Far East.
Born in Ukraine during the Soviet era and educated at Harvard and Stanford, Dmitriev worked as a consultant at the US consulting firm McKinsey and as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine, he was placed under US sanctions. At the time, the US Treasury Department called him a "close associate of Putin" and his family.
US authorities temporarily lifted sanctions against Dmitriev so that the US State Department could issue him a visa to enter the country.