WASHINGTON — President Trump is set to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin next Thursday on the sidelines of the annual APEC summit in Shenzhen, The Post has learned. The leaders are expected to focus heavily on the possibility of negotiating an ambitious nuclear arms-control agreement.
The gathering would mark the first trilateral summit involving the leaders of the United States, China and Russia.
A White House official said the talks in the Chinese megacity near Hong Kong could also address the war in Iran and tensions involving North Korea.
Trump has not met Putin in person since their August summit in Alaska, where they discussed the president’s efforts to broker an end to the war in Ukraine — another issue that could surface in Shenzhen. Trump hosted Xi at the White House in September.
The president has pursued close personal relationships with his authoritarian counterparts, maintaining that engagement with historically adversarial nations serves US and global interests.
Trump has promoted the idea of an agreement to reduce nuclear arsenals since his first term, arguing that maintaining enough weapons to destroy the world repeatedly is both dangerous and needlessly expensive. The proposal, however, has yet to become reality.
The summit comes at a delicate moment in US-China relations. One of America’s most influential technology executives, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, was forced to resign after reports exposed his relationship with an alleged Chinese spy.
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Huang traveled with Trump during the president’s most recent trip to China in May.
Trump welcomed Xi to the White House less than two months ago, displaying a framed photograph of himself on a West Wing wall and complimenting the Chinese leader’s knowledge of stone after showing him Trump’s new granite helipad.
While Ukraine is not expected to dominate the agenda, the meeting will take place as Trump continues efforts to negotiate a peace agreement.
US special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have held repeated meetings with Putin this year in an effort to advance negotiations to end his nearly five-year war against Kyiv. Their latest meeting at the Kremlin took place Thursday.
Trump has already nearly confirmed plans for the three-way meeting involving the leaders of the nations that control most of the world’s nuclear weapons.
“One of the meetings, I think, will be with President Putin and President Xi, and that’ll be interesting,” Trump told reporters Sunday. “We’ll talk a lot of things, including denuclearization, but we’ll be talking a lot of things. We’re trying to end the war in Iran, and we’re doing well.”
