The leaders of the United States, China and Russia will sit down together for the first time on November 19, when Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin hold a three-way meeting in the Chinese city of Shenzhen. The talks will take place on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, and the Kremlin has now confirmed that the meeting is definitely going ahead.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov announced the plan, saying an agreement had been reached for the three presidents to meet on the 19th.
What Is on the Table
Nuclear arms control and the situation around Iran are expected to dominate the discussion. Trump has said that talks in this format are needed mainly to discuss nuclear disarmament, and the White House has confirmed that reducing the number of nuclear weapons is high on his list of priorities. The significance of the format is hard to overstate: the United States, Russia and China hold the three largest nuclear arsenals in the world, and their leaders have never before met together in one room to talk about the weapons that define the balance of power between them.
The timing adds to the weight of the occasion. The New START treaty, the last major arms control agreement between Washington and Moscow, has been allowed to lapse, leaving the world’s two largest nuclear powers without a formal framework limiting their arsenals. Bringing Beijing into the conversation has long been an ambition of American policymakers, since China has been expanding its own arsenal, but previous efforts to create a three-way dialogue never got off the ground. A meeting of the three leaders does not by itself produce a treaty, yet it opens a channel that has not existed before.
Iran will be the other major item on the agenda, and in many ways the more urgent one. The United States and Israel launched a war on Iran in February, and although a memorandum of understanding signed in June reopened discussion of a wider settlement, that document expired in August without a comprehensive deal. The central dispute is over Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium. Before the June 2025 strikes on its nuclear facilities, the International Atomic Energy Agency estimated that Tehran held 440.9 kilogrammes of uranium enriched to up to 60 per cent, far above the level needed for civilian power. Trump has called for zero uranium enrichment, while Tehran insists enrichment is its right under the Non-Proliferation Treaty and has refused to send any of the material abroad. With the Strait of Hormuz still closed and Qatar mediating, any common ground the three leaders find on Iran could shape whether diplomacy gets another chance.
How the Summit Came Together
The meeting did not come out of nowhere. Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov said last month that preparations had begun and that Moscow, Beijing and Washington were ready in principle to hold the talks. China’s Foreign Ministry confirmed on November 6 that discussions were under way, and two days later Trump said he expected to meet Putin and Xi at the summit. The White House has since confirmed the plan. One detail remains unsettled: Ushakov added that Russia and the United States had not agreed on a separate one-on-one meeting between Putin and Trump, so for now the trilateral format is the only confirmed encounter between the two.
The setting matters as much as the guest list. The 33rd APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting takes place at the Shenzhen International Exchange Center at Xiangmi Lake, under the theme of building an Asia-Pacific community to prosper together, with openness, innovation and cooperation as its priorities. It is China’s third time hosting the leaders’ meeting, after Shanghai in 2001 and Beijing in 2014, and Shenzhen’s first. Xi will chair the meeting.
Not everyone is comfortable with the plan. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has said many European leaders fear the talks could turn into a second Anchorage, a reference to the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska in August 2025. That meeting, at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, lasted around three hours and ended without any agreement on Ukraine. Russia later spoke of the spirit of Anchorage, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio said there had been no agreement in Alaska, only a proposal, and Putin himself later acknowledged that there were indeed no agreements. A year on, the episode is remembered in Europe as a cautionary tale about what can happen when Trump and Putin meet without Kyiv or its allies in the room.
What happens on November 19 will be judged by what follows it. If the three leaders agree to keep talking, whether on arms control, Iran or both, the meeting will have done its job even without a dramatic announcement. If they emerge with nothing more than a photograph, the sceptics will say the exercise was theatre. Either way, the image of Trump, Xi and Putin at one table will be one of the defining pictures of the year.
