Trump, Xi and Putin to Hold First Three-Way Summit at APEC in Shenzhen

President Donald Trump will meet the leaders of China and Russia together on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen next week, the White House said Friday. "President Trump will conclude his visit to China with a trilateral meeting between the president of the United States, the president of the People's Republic of China and the president of the Russian Federation," spokesperson Olivia Wales told reporters. Trump, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have never gathered as a trio before.

Wales said Trump will push nuclear weapons reduction, calling their spread "very dangerous" in his view. A senior U.S. official described the session as an "entry point" and "the first conversation," and said no agreement is anticipated. The same official said it's time for China to "step up" to "the adults' table."

The numbers explain the gap. China's arsenal tops 600 warheads by Pentagon estimates, while the U.S. and Russia each hold more than 5,000. China has shown little appetite for a nuclear pact with its stockpile dwarfed by the other two. New START, the last arms treaty between Washington and Moscow, expired in February — ending caps on the two largest arsenals for the first time in over half a century. Trump turned down Russia's request to extend it a year and called for a "new, improved and modernized" deal that brings China in.

Trump plans to raise the Iran war with Xi and Putin, but not Ukraine, according to a senior U.S. official, who said Ukraine talks run on a separate "track" China isn't part of, making it not "appropriate." No one-on-one with Putin is scheduled, though the two will appear together at events and at the trilateral. There are no plans for Trump to engage North Korea on the trip.

Elon Musk will be the only business leader in the president's delegation, a senior U.S. official said, adding that he won't take part in official meetings. Two senior officials also said they don't expect Trump to bring up the espionage investigation into Alice Huang, an alleged Chinese intelligence agent accused of a romantic relationship with Nvidia chief Jensen Huang. "We do not negotiate American export controls," one official said, calling the matter a national security issue with "no bearing" on the trip.

Analysts see three different motives. Edgard Kagan, a former U.S. ambassador to Malaysia now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the key for Putin "was that this was very much about signaling a desire to talk to the president and talk to Chairman Xi in a way that suggests that they're making decisions on Ukraine." Hoo Tiang Boon, a Chinese foreign policy professor at Nanyang Technological University, said the trilateral "runs counter to Chinese support of multilateralism" as Beijing hosts 21 economies in a city it wants to show off as a tech hub. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has voiced concern the meeting could become a platform for a Ukraine deal made behind Kyiv's back, and planners are already drawing Yalta Conference comparisons — which Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed, noting any agreements reached in Shenzhen can't be imposed on others.