Why Does Putin Want a Trump and Xi Summit in Shenzhen?

Vladimir Putin proposed a meeting with Donald Trump and Xi Jinping next month, the Wall Street Journal reported, during his 9 October call with Trump, the call that also produced the Russian diesel deal. On Thursday Putin told Russian television that Moscow is ready to resume three-way talks with Washington and Kyiv.

Ukraine would not be at the table. Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha has said a Russia, China and US summit would only encourage Putin to go on fighting, and Kremlin officials have said little about what the three leaders would discuss.

This piece follows our earlier accounts of what Witkoff told Putin and of the 60-day sanctions pause. It covers what has been said since about the summit.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the summit idea came from Putin and was put to Trump on the same call as the diesel deal. Trump has said he is willing, with arms control as the topic. Russian officials disagree with one another on whether the meeting is even under discussion.

The Wall Street Journal reported on 19 October, citing informed sources, that Putin suggested a meeting with Trump and Xi on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Shenzhen in mid-November, to discuss Ukraine. According to the account carried by Novaya Gazeta Europe, Moscow relayed the request to Beijing, which said it would not object if Trump agreed. An unnamed senior White House official told the paper that Trump had not agreed but could be open to it.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the Journal that there was “no clear understanding yet regarding the meeting itself or its potential agenda”, in the Kyiv Independent’s translation. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that “there’s been talks of a meeting” and added: “I don’t know whether it’s been finalized.”

Speaking to reporters outside the White House on 20 October, Trump said, in the Moscow Times’ Russian rendering of his remarks, he would raise nuclear weapons and denuclearisation and that he was ready if Xi was interested. Agenzia Nova summarised the same remarks as an opening to a summit on armaments and disarmament.

Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko was more guarded. In remarks to Russian media reported by Anadolu Agency, he said all three countries had an interest in such a meeting but that, as far as he knew, it was not being discussed in practice at that time.

Sybiha wrote on X on 19 October that a trilateral meeting of the leaders of Russia, China and the United States “would do only the opposite” of helping to end the war. The Kyiv Independent reported him arguing that a meeting without Ukraine could only encourage Putin to continue.

On Thursday Putin spoke to the Russian broadcaster Vesti, in remarks carried by TASS and reported by Gulf News. “We agreed that we are ready to resume our trilateral consultations,” he said. He called Europe’s talk of preparing for war with Russia “some kind of political schizophrenia”. He also said Europe cannot defeat Russia strategically.

A day earlier, Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said after Putin’s meeting with Steve Witkoff in St Petersburg that talks could resume in mid-November. Putin, he said, wanted them to concern “building a security system for Russia and Ukraine after the conflict ends”. Witkoff had brought “new approaches” from the European Union and Kyiv, Ushakov said, but “there wasn’t all that much that was useful in them in terms of settling the Ukrainian crisis”. Both quotations are Meduza’s translation of Russian remarks.

Ushakov puts the three-way talks on Ukraine in mid-November. The Shenzhen summit is on 18 and 19 November.

On 16 October Trump signed an order waiving a new package of sanctions and tariffs under a law he had signed in September. On Truth Social he said he did not “want to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table”. Kirill Dmitriev, a Russian presidential envoy, called the decision a “significant and truly historic moment”. Zelensky, speaking in Brussels, said Ukraine “can’t accept diesel deals, because gas deals will come next”.

Ian Kelly, a former State Department diplomat and ambassador in residence at Northwestern, told the Associated Press that the pause would “even more likely that the only thing he’s going to accept is complete capitulation”. He added that “Putin interprets accommodation or appeasement as weakness”.

Putin proposed the summit, according to the Journal. Peskov says the agenda is unclear and Rudenko says it is not being discussed.

Trump named nuclear arms as his topic. Sybiha’s objection is that Ukraine would have no seat.

Three markers will show whether the summit is real. First, whether the White House confirms Trump’s attendance at Shenzhen before 18 November. Second, whether Moscow publishes an agenda, since Peskov said none was yet understood. Third, whether the trilateral talks with Kyiv get a date and a venue. Peskov has named Abu Dhabi.

If Trump goes to Shenzhen while the Kyiv talks have no date, the summit will have come first. Sybiha’s objection is aimed at exactly that order.