WASHINGTON (The Thursday Times) — US President Donald Trump will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Shenzhen next week, the White House said on Friday, in what would be the first three-way summit between the three leaders, with Trump set to push for cuts to nuclear arsenals.
The meeting is scheduled for Thursday on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Shenzhen, China’s technology hub. Trump leaves Washington on Monday for a four-day Asia trip that also takes in the Philippines.
“He will discuss the reduction of nuclear weapons in the world, whose proliferation President Trump believes is very dangerous,” White House spokesperson Olivia Wales told reporters.
No deal expected
Washington is playing down hopes of a breakthrough. “We do not expect to get to any kind of agreement,” a senior US official said, describing the meeting as the start of a conversation. The official said it was “time for China to sort of step up” and join talks on nuclear weapons.
Briefing reporters on condition of anonymity, the official said Trump would raise the war with Iran with both leaders but was not expected to bring up Russia’s war in Ukraine. Elon Musk will travel with Trump to China but will not attend the meeting, and Trump is not expected to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during the trip.
The summit comes nine months after the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the last nuclear arms pact between Washington and Moscow, expired in February, leaving the two largest arsenals without caps for the first time in more than 50 years. Trump turned down a Russian offer to extend the treaty by a year and called for a “new, improved and modernized” deal that includes China.
Russia holds the most nuclear warheads, followed by the United States and then China, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
Beijing and Moscow
China has long resisted three-way arms talks, arguing that Russia and the United States, which hold far larger arsenals, should negotiate between themselves. In October its Foreign Ministry said it would be “neither fair, reasonable nor realistic” to ask China to join such negotiations at this stage.
China said earlier this week that it was in talks on a Trump-Xi-Putin meeting at APEC, but Chinese state media have so far spoken only of bilateral talks for Xi at the summit. Neither Beijing nor Moscow had commented on the White House announcement by Friday evening.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has called the prospect of the meeting “extremely significant” while rejecting comparisons with the 1945 Yalta Conference, saying any agreements reached in Shenzhen could not be imposed on others. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has voiced concern that the meeting could be used to discuss a Ukraine deal behind Kyiv’s back.
Xi is also expected to press Trump on Taiwan, an issue that sets the terms for his meeting with the US president.
