President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping are planning a historic joint meeting on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen, China, next week, the White House said.
The encounter would bring together the leaders of the world’s biggest nuclear powers.
White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales told reporters that Trump will attend the APEC summit in the southern city and that the three leaders will meet at the end of his visit. “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 be discussed, while Ukraine is not expected to be on the agenda. Russia has confirmed the meeting. China has not yet reacted.
A senior US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said no agreement was expected to follow the talks.
Trump is due to arrive in Shenzhen late on Wednesday for the two-day summit of the 21-member grouping. He will hold bilateral talks with Xi on Thursday, their fourth meeting since the US president returned to office in 2025. The trilateral meeting will conclude his visit to China, Wales said.
Before China, Trump will attend an Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit in the Philippines on Tuesday. Wales said the trip would “secure historic wins to the American people and advance America’s interests in the Indo Pacific.”
The meeting comes against the backdrop of the expiration in February of a nuclear weapons control treaty between the United States and Russia. The lapse left the world’s biggest nuclear arsenals without major guardrails and effectively marked an end to the arms control cooperation that helped resolve the Cold War.
The United Nations 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. Former senior US officials and analysts said at the time that seeking Beijing’s and Moscow’s cooperation could create major hurdles and take years.
Xi hosted both Putin and Trump in Beijing just days apart earlier this year, and Trump 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, a war that isolated Russia and left it subject to Western sanctions.
A controversial US deal to import Russian diesel and the suspension of sanctions targeting the biggest buyers of Moscow’s oil and gas, including China, heightened European concern last month about the Trump administration’s softening toward 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, their race for artificial intelligence dominance, and Taiwan.
The war in Iran has also been a sticking point. Beijing is the largest buyer of Tehran’s oil and its largest trading partner.
Chinese state media reported on Friday that Xi would take part in “bilateral” talks on the sidelines of the APEC summit, quoting a foreign ministry spokesman. The reports did not mention the trilateral meeting.
Earlier this month, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russian state media that there were “signals confirming readiness” for such talks at the summit.