India, Feb. 14 -- Vladimir Putin's heavyweight team for negotiations to end Russia's war in Ukraine has decades of experience in high-stakes negotiations. It also includes a prominent member who has been under US sanctions.

Kirill Dmitriev, a financier educated at Stanford and Harvard with ties to the Russian president's own family, may play a key role as an unofficial back-channel with Donald Trump's negotiators, people familiar with the preparations told Bloomberg.

Others in the team include Yuri Ushakov, Putin's chief Kremlin foreign-policy advisor, who has more than half a century of involvement in diplomacy, and Sergei Naryshkin, who served with Putin in the Soviet KGB, the report added.

The Russian President seems to be opting to...