Reported by Al Jazeera
A Trump-Xi-Putin meeting at APEC would be a coup for Moscow, analysts say, but Beijing appears lukewarm.
On the sidelines of this month’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Shenzhen, China, an unprecedented three-way meeting between United States President Donald Trump, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin could take place.
“China is in communication with relevant parties regarding a meeting between the three heads of state,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning told reporters in Beijing on Wednesday.
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“Work is under way to coordinate such a meeting,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Tuesday, adding: “We hope that it will be finalised in the coming days.”
Trump has said he is open to three-way talks focused on nuclear weapons. “If President Xi wants to have it, I’d have it,” he told reporters last month.
The three leaders have met separately but have never held formal talks together.
So could the meeting, pencilled in for November 18-19, actually happen, and what would it mean for the rest of the world? Here’s what we know:
“It is a big event,” Alexander Bratersky, a Moscow-based journalist and political analyst, told Al Jazeera.
He pointed to Pyotr Tolstoy, chairman of the Russian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, who he said has described the meeting as a path towards a new Yalta – the 1945 conference where the leaders of the Soviet Union, the US and the United Kingdom shaped the post-war order in Europe.
That allows Moscow to “talk big”, Bratersky said, while putting Ukraine on the sidelines.
Simply being at the table would make Putin “first among equals”, he added, giving him a photo opportunity to show the world that he will be among those deciding the future of Europe’s security architecture after the war in Ukraine.
If the meeting produced results, he said, it would reflect China’s influence on Russia.
“We should take into account that we are dealing with a much weaker US leader after elections,” Bratersky said.
Trump remains in charge of foreign policy, he explained, but will have less leverage if Democrats, who won control of both…