Trump To Meet With China’s Xi And Russia’s Putin At Historic Trilateral Sit-down On Nuclear Non-proliferation

President Donald Trump will meet jointly next week with China’s leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin, the White House said Friday, a first-ever trilateral sit-down between the leaders of the three countries.

The meeting, on the sidelines of the APEC summit in China, will focus on nuclear non-proliferation, a topic Trump has said he believes could yield a new agreement between the world’s biggest nuclear-armed states.

“The President has made it clear that, among other topics, he will discuss the reduction of nuclear weapons in the world. This proliferation, President Trump believes, is very dangerous,” Olivia Wales, a White House spokesman, told reporters.

The Kremlin says that the meeting will take place on November 19 in the Chinese city of Shenzhen, but there has been no confirmation yet from China.

While a trilateral convention taking this exact formation is unprecedented, separately the leaders have a wealth of history.

Since becoming president in 2013, Xi has met with Putin dozens of times. The pair have built a close alliance, bound by ties that run deep between their nations.

China has claimed neutrality in the war and sought to position itself as a potential peace broker. But NATO allies believe it has been instrumental in Russia’s effort to defeat Ukraine, providing Moscow with equipment to support weapon assembly, and contributing technology and imagery.

Trump and Putin have convened in-person on seven different occasions, most recently in Alaska in 2025. The two leaders’ relationship has, at times, been tumultuous, but it appears to have strengthened in recent months.

Trump faced a barrage of domestic criticism in October when he suspended fuel export sanctions on Russia for at least six months, allowing Putin to release diesel into the global energy market at a time when US fuel prices were skyrocketing.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers accused Trump of defying a federal law designed to crack down on Russia and stifle its economy amid its war on Ukraine.

The last nuclear arms treaty between the US and Russia expired in February.

China, meanwhile, has been rapidly building its nuclear arsenal.

Officials downplayed the prospect of striking a new deal on nuclear matters, suggesting instead the talks would be a starting point.

“We do not expect to get to any kind of agreement,” a senior US official said. “I would characterize this as the entry point, the first conversation, certainly at the leader level, between these countries.”

“So this is the beginning of hopefully a conversation that can be productive going forward,” the official went on.

While officials said the three leaders also planned to discuss Iran, it is unclear if they intend to discuss Russia’s near-five-year-old conflict with Ukraine.

Back in October, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky voiced concern that a trilateral meeting between Trump, Xi and Putin might lead to dealmaking about the future of Ukraine without consulting Kyiv.

“We really don’t want this to turn into ‘Yalta 2, 3, 4,’ with a redistribution of influence,” Zelensky told journalists last month, drawing a comparison with the 1945 Yalta Conference in Crimea at which the Allied powers effectively redrew the global map in the aftermath of World War Two.

A senior US official said Elon Musk was expected to go on the trip with Trump, among others, though he is not expected to attend the trilateral meeting.

SOURCE: CNN