Trump, Putin and Xi plan trilateral meeting in China next week, White House says

The leaders of the United States, Russia and China are planning to meet next week on the sidelines of a summit in China, the White House has said.

The talks between President Donald Trump, President Vladimir Putin and President Xi Jinping will take place as Trump attends the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit in the southern city of Shenzhen, spokeswoman Olivia Wales told reporters.

“The president has made it clear that, among other topics, he will discuss the reduction of nuclear weapons in the world, whose proliferation President Trump believes is very dangerous,” she said. Iran may also come up during the meeting of the world's biggest nuclear powers, it is understood, but Ukraine is not expected to be on the agenda. Moscow and Beijing have yet to comment.

No agreement is expected to follow the talks, an unnamed senior American official said, according to the news agencies AP and Reuters.

Trump is due to arrive in Shenzhen late on Wednesday for the two-day gathering of the bloc's 21 member states. He will also hold bilateral talks with Xi on Thursday, their fourth meeting since the US president returned to office in 2025. “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,” Wales said.

The trip will also include an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) summit in the Philippines on Tuesday. Wales said the journey would “secure historic wins to the American people and advance America's interests in the Indo Pacific.”

The planned trilateral comes after a nuclear weapons control treaty between the US and Russia expired in February, leaving the world's biggest nuclear arsenals without major guardrails and effectively ending the arms control cooperation that helped resolve the Cold War. The UN has urged both sides to agree a new framework without delay. Trump has said he could replace the deal with a better agreement that included China, which has been building up its arsenal, though former senior US officials and analysts told the BBC at the time that seeking Beijing and Moscow's cooperation could face major hurdles and take years.

The meeting follows a year of busy diplomacy among the three powers. Xi separately hosted both Putin and Trump in Beijing just days apart earlier this year, while the US president welcomed his Chinese counterpart to Washington in September. Beijing has become a crucial trading partner for Moscow since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which isolated the country and left it subject to Western sanctions. Last month, a controversial US deal to import Russian diesel, together with the suspension of sanctions targeting the biggest buyers of Moscow's oil and gas, including China, heightened European concern about the Trump administration's softening towards the Kremlin.

Trump and Xi have sought to project warmer ties at summits in Beijing and Washington this year, though little significant progress appears to have been made on key issues such as trade, the race for AI dominance and Taiwan. The war in Iran has also been a sticking point, with Beijing the largest buyer of Tehran's oil and its biggest trade partner.

Chinese state media reported on Friday that Xi would take part in “bilateral” talks on the sidelines of the Apec summit, citing a foreign ministry spokesman, but has not reported on the trilateral meeting. Earlier this month, Russian state news agency Tass reported that Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov had said there were “signals confirming readiness” for such talks at the summit.