© Doug Mills/The New York Times
The Trump administration is assessing an application from the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) to be removed from the US sanctions list, a US official told The New York Times (NYT). A day later, Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said the two sides were in talks over it.
Washington has been easing pressure on Moscow piece by piece. On 9 October, the Treasury issued a general license allowing sales of Russian diesel, including into the US. A week later, President Trump waived new sanctions under the Graham Act, a Russia sanctions law he had signed on 18 September. Meanwhile, Kyiv is still waiting for the next round of three-way peace talks. Freeing a Kremlin fund now would lift another cost from Moscow before any settlement on Ukraine.
The fund is run by Kirill Dmitriev, Vladimir Putin’s envoy in talks with Washington. The official said the administration was weighing the application through established procedures, as part of an effort to “improve US-Russia relations and help end the war.”
The official also praised Dmitriev as “a helpful envoy.” Russian officials pushed for delisting during talks on the fund’s role in shipping Russian diesel to the US, people familiar with the negotiations told the NYT. The Treasury, however, held that its 9 October license already let the fund handle diesel transactions, the paper reported.
Ushakov described a two-way conversation rather than a review. He said on 28 October that it had been going on for some time and that he did not know the outcome. He pointed in particular to Dmitriev’s active contacts, saying that was why the issue had come up.
The Treasury fully blocked the fund and Dmitriev on 28 February 2022, four days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion. At the time, it said the fund was widely considered a slush fund for Putin. The Treasury is handling the new request under its normal process, and the fund will have to prove the grounds for its sanctions no longer apply, people familiar with the process told the NYT.
Eric Green oversaw Russia policy at the White House National Security Council under President Joe Biden. He told the paper that lifting the sanctions would send a strong message. In his view, Washington would be relaxing its position of not easing sanctions and other costs until a settlement in Ukraine.
This is not Dmitriev’s first push this year. On 7 February, Zelenskyy said Ukrainian intelligence had shown him a so-called “Dmitriev package” of US-Russia cooperation, worth about $12 trillion, that Dmitriev presented in the US. In April, he arrived in Washington as a US oil waiver for Russia neared expiry. US delisting would not touch UK and EU restrictions on the fund. But it would reopen American finance to a fund the Treasury said Putin’s inner circle relied on to raise money abroad.
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