The leaders of the United States, China and Russia gathered together for an unprecedented time! Trump, Xi Jinping, Putin hold APEC sideline talks next week

The White House confirmed on Friday (13th) that US President Trump, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin plan to hold trilateral talks on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit to be held in Shenzhen, China next Thursday (19th). This will be an unprecedented tripartite gathering of the leaders of the world's three major nuclear powers, but analysts generally believe that the symbolic significance of this meeting outweighs the actual breakthrough.

The Associated Press reported that this Big Three summit comes at a time when relations between the United States, China and Russia are complicated. Anonymous senior US officials revealed that Trump plans to discuss the US-Iran war with Xi Jinping and Putin during the meeting, as well as promote the signing of a new trilateral nuclear arms control agreement, but will deliberately avoid the Ukraine issue. As the last nuclear arms treaty between the United States and Russia, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), expired in February this year, Trump rejected Russia’s proposal to extend it for one year and instead demanded that China be included in the new agreement.

U.S. officials also admitted that Beijing, which has more than 600 nuclear warheads, has little interest in joining the arms control negotiations between the United States and Russia (each possessing more than 5,000 nuclear warheads). The talks are only "opening dialogue" and no agreement is expected to be announced.

Analysis pointed out that for the leaders of China and Russia, each of these talks has its own agenda. Xi Jinping agreed to host the talks, probably because he saw this moment as an opportunity for him to demonstrate China's growing influence and prestige; Putin wanted to use this to create a superpower posture on equal footing with the United States and China.

Hoo Tiang Boon, a professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, analyzed that the sideline talks between the three giants may take away the glory of the APEC summit and may weaken China's efforts to portray itself as a defender of free trade at the summit. "This is to some extent contrary to China's support for multilateralism."

In addition, because Trump has only recently waived sanctions against Russia and reached a multi-million-ton diesel deal, the outside world has also compared this meeting to the "Yalta Conference" in 1945 to carve up spheres of influence, causing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to worry that major powers are conducting transactions behind Kiev's back.