China has confirmed for the first time that it is in talks over a possible three-way meeting between President Trump, Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to a report citing Bloomberg. The floated venue is the APEC leaders' summit, scheduled for Nov. 18-19 in Shenzhen.

The idea originated in Moscow. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said "work is under way on organizing such a meeting," according to wire reports, and a Financial Times account described both Washington and Moscow pressing Beijing to agree to host the sit-down. China's foreign ministry has not confirmed Trump's attendance alongside Putin specifically, though Beijing has separately said it expects Trump and Xi to meet both at APEC and again at a G20 summit in Miami in December.

No deal yet

No final arrangement has been reached, and officials in all three capitals have been careful to frame the talks as preliminary. A Putin-Xi bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the Shenzhen summit is considered all but certain; whether Trump joins for a genuine three-way session remains the open question, according to regional wire coverage of Beijing's comments.

A trilateral summit would be a diplomatic first, bringing together the leaders of the world's three most powerful militaries at a single table amid ongoing U.S.-brokered negotiations to end the Russia-Ukraine war and simmering tension between Washington and Tehran. Analysts quoted across outlets covering the talks note that even a symbolic three-way photo opportunity would send a signal about the state of great-power relations heading into 2027, though few expect concrete agreements to emerge from a first encounter of this kind.

The APEC summit falls just a week after Russia, Ukraine and the U.S. are separately due to hold trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi on Nov. 10-11 — the first such three-way negotiations since February — adding another data point to a cluster of high-stakes diplomacy converging in the back half of November. Neither the White House nor the Kremlin has released a formal itinerary for Trump's APEC travel, and officials cautioned that scheduling conflicts or last-minute disputes over agenda items could still push the format toward separate bilateral meetings instead.