Russian President Vladimir Putin is taking the upcoming ceasefire talks with US President Donald Trump very seriously and has put together a heavy-weight team of his top officials to conduct the negotiations.

It includes Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s go-to man on foreign policy and a former ambassador to the US; Sergey Naryshkin, Putin’s top foreign intelligence officer, who will considered the domestic implications of any deal; and the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Russia Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), Kirill Dmitriev, who was educated at Stanford and Harvard and is Russia’s deal-maker-in-chief.

President Trump has assigned Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz and Special Envoy for the Middle East Steve Witkoff to lead negotiations with Russia.

Yuri Ushakov: a Russian diplomat and politician, Ushakov has served as Assistant to the President for Foreign Policy Affairs since 2012 and previously was Russia’s ambassador to the US for a decade starting in 1998 at a time when the emphasis on relations was on constructive engagement, not conflict.

“The 77-year-old veteran diplomat has been Putin’s main foreign policy advisor since 2012, and as foreign minister Sergei Lavrov’s standing and influence diminish, Ushakov’s role has only grown,” bne IntelliNews columnist and security analyst Mark Galeotti said in a piece for The Spectator.

A member of the Soviet elite, he has spent his whole career at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) and served as Putin’s deputy chief of staff when Putin was Prime Minister between 2008 and 2012.

Something of an eminence grise standing behind the throne, Ushakov is one of the key strategists behind Russia’s foreign policy, with a special focus on US-Russia relations and diplomatic negotiations with Western countries. He is known for his hard-nosed, behind-the-scenes diplomacy and has been described by those that worked with him as a “consummate diplomat.” He has also been heavily involved in shaping Russian policy on major international issues, including the Ukraine conflict and relations with China.

In the talks with the US, he will focus on the big picture geopolitical issues and push for a big package deal that concerns not only ending the conflict in Ukraine, but also sanctions relief and restarting talks on renewing the lapsed Cold War era arms control treaties. The Kremlin’s overarching goal is to assure Russia’s security and the MFA has already proposed a new pan-European regional security deal in 2008 that might be revived in some form in the upcoming talks as a way to providing Ukraine with security guarantees demanded by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that are unlikely to be offered, following comments by senior US officials at this week’s Munich Security Conference (MSC).

Sergey Naryshkin: a prominent Russian politician and spymaster, Naryshkin has served as the Director of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) since October 2016. After graduating with an engineering degree in 1978, he enrolled in the KGB in the French section and belongs to Putin’s St Petersburg circle of acquaintance that he brought down to Moscow when he took over in 2000.

“The SVR has already been involved in quiet engagement with the CIA, though, and despite his KGB background, Naryshkin is more politician than spook,” says Galeotti. “He is a political operator in his own right as a former speaker of the State Duma, the lower chamber of the legislature, but also a Putin loyalist, whom the president can rely on to keep an eye on the domestic political implications of any deal, while Ushakov focuses on the geopolitics.”

A former Deputy Prime Minister of Russia from 2004 to 2008, he was a senior member of Putin’s government during his second term in office, focusing on economics and collaboration with the other members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). After Putin became Prime Minister in 2008, he continued in government under then President Dmitri Medvedev, before becoming Chairman of the Duma in 2011 until 2016, when he was appointed the Speaker of the Duma, until he took over the SVR.

Naryshkin has been the point man for Putin in several diplomatic missions, travelling to Pyongyang, North Korea, in March last year where he met with North Korean Minister of State Security Ri Chang Dae that transformed into increasing tight ties between Russia and the pariah Asian state. By December that year, Naryshkin stated that Russia was nearing its strategic goals in Ukraine and held the upper hand in the conflict and is seen as a hawk on Russia’s relations with the West.

He played a public role in Russia’s justification of its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, appearing in a televised tense meeting with Putin just before the invasion and has been sanctioned by Europe and the US.

Naryshkin will be responsible for making sure any deal fits with Russia’s domestic goals and tallies with the interests of its partners like North Korea and China. Last week he told reporters that the Kremlin had already instructed Russian intelligence services to continue to engage with their US counterparts following Trump's phone call with Putin the day before.

Both Ushakov and Naryshkin were involved in ceasefire talks with Ukraine shortly after Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022.

Kirill Dmitriev: As recently profiled by bne IntelliNews, Dmitriev is one of the rising stars from the next generation in the Kremlin. He was born in Ukraine but educated in the US under a Soviet-era exchange programme before returning to Russia and working at a US-funded project to develop the private equity markets in Russia. Later he worked as a fund manager for Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk before being appointed the head of the newly established RDIF, which was designed to husband large private equity investments into Russia.

Dmitriev knows the Americans well and attempted to coax the biggest Western funds to invest in Russia in the boom years, without much success. He then refocused his attention on the Middle East with a lot more success where he is very well connected. He recently brokered the deal to release US teacher Paul Fogel from a Russian jail where he was serving a 14-year sentence on cannabis possession charges together with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS). His Middle Eastern connections will also come in handy given the talks are due to be held in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA).

Dmitriev also maintains contacts with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and other senior Americans in both the White House and business worlds. He was mentioned in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report for his efforts to "establish contact" with the Trump administration after the US president's first election.

Dmitriev’s claim to fame is he funded and then oversaw the Sputnik V production and distribution of Russia’s highly successful Sputnik V vaccine that was developed in an extraordinarily short amount of time, but proved to be one of the most effective vaccines developed despite lingering concerns about its safety.

The Kremlin distributed the vaccine to allies around the world at a time when the West was hoarding the doses it produced for its own populations in what was seen as “vaccine apartheid” by many countries in the Global South. Dmitriev spearheaded this diplomatic effort that earned Russia much gratitude in the Emerging Markets as part of Russia’s outreach to the Global South.

A Kremlin insider has suggested that Putin’s aide Vladimir Medinsky could be involved, who led the delegation that negotiated the failed Istanbul peace deal in April 2022, Ukrainska Pravda reports.

Middle Eastern dimension

The Middle Eastern dimension in these talks has grown in importance and Dmitriev is the perfect counter party for talks with Trump’s Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, who has been promoted and also given responsibly for bring the conflict in Ukraine, which some have seen as demotion for the titular head of the US delegation dealing with the ceasefire talks, special envoy to Ukraine retired Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg.

Dmitriev and Witkoff have already met as they were both key in brokering the deal to release Fogel. And Witkoff has a very similar background to Dmitriev, as a former real estate investor that did a lot of business in the Middle East.

It may be that the talks are expanded to take in a settlement to the conflict in Gaza, given Trump’s penchant for “big package deals.” Trump declared last week that the US would take over the enclave, expel the Palestinians, and turn it into the “Riviera” of the Middle East. MbS on February 14 called for a summit of the leading five Arab states to thrash out a response to this controversial proposal and Secretary of State Marco Rubio called on the Arab to “come up with your own ideas” during his remarks at the MSC the same day.

Trump is widely seen to be uninterested in the Ukraine conflict, describing it as “Europe’s problem” and not the existential threat to global security and the “values-based world order” that drove the Biden administration’s actions. He likes big gestures and would also like to see the Gaza conflict rapidly resolved so the chances of talks on the two conflicts being merged is good, hence choosing Riyadh as the venue for the negotiations and excluding both the EU and Ukraine from the talks, which have a much narrower focus on ending the war in Ukraine to Kyiv’s advantage and a “just” peace.