White House Announces First Trump-Xi-Putin Summit in China
White House says Trump, Xi and Putin will hold their first three-way meeting in Shenzhen next week, with nuclear arms and Iran on the agenda but not Ukraine.
ERBIL (Kurdistan24) - US President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping will hold the first three-way meeting between the leaders of their countries at a summit in Shenzhen next week, the White House said on Friday.
“The president has made it clear that, among other topics, he will discuss the reduction of nuclear weapons in the world.
This proliferation, President Trump believes, is very dangerous,” White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales told reporters. She said the three leaders will meet on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in the southern Chinese city.
The trilateral talks are scheduled for Thursday.
US officials said Trump also plans to raise Iran at the meeting but is not expected to discuss Russia’s war in Ukraine.
“I think the president does intend to talk about Iran in the trilateral meeting with Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin,” a senior US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told reporters on a call.
On Ukraine, the official said Washington has a “whole other track” of negotiations with Kyiv and Moscow aimed at ending the war, referring to recent talks between US envoys and both Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“China is not really a part of that track, so it doesn’t seem appropriate to have the Ukraine discussion there,” the official added.
Zelensky has warned that the Shenzhen meeting could amount to a Yalta-like “redistribution of spheres of influence” for the 21st century.
The reference is to the 1945 Yalta summit in the Soviet Union, where then-US president Franklin D. Roosevelt, Britain’s Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin laid out the post-World War II settlement and new territorial boundaries in Europe.
The Trump administration, for its part, has sought to reassert US dominance over the “Western hemisphere,” including by capturing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January.
Beyond the trilateral session, Trump will hold a bilateral working lunch and meeting with Xi on Thursday, their fourth meeting since Trump returned to power last year.
He is not scheduled to hold a separate one-on-one meeting with Putin.
The officials also addressed topics that are not expected to come up in Trump’s talks with Xi. They include the resignation of Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang over an affair with an alleged Chinese spy.
“The situation with Nvidia should not really have any bearing on the trip,” a second senior US official said. The United States also does not plan to discuss export controls on sensitive chip technology, which were at the heart of the Nvidia scandal.
“We do not negotiate American export controls. These are national security matters that we develop in the administration... and we don’t expect it to figure at all in any of our conversations with the Chinese while we’re there,” the second official said.
Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk will accompany Trump on the trip but will not take part in the meeting with Xi and Putin, the officials said.
Trump will leave Washington on Monday and arrive in the Philippines on Tuesday for a summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) before heading to Shenzhen.