US President Donald Trump said on Monday that he is open to a three-way summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin in China next month — but he made clear the meeting would be about nuclear weapons, not about ending the war in Ukraine.
“We would have it to talk about nuclear weapons and denuclearization,” Trump told reporters outside the White House before departing for Kansas. “If President Xi wants to have it, I’d have it. I’m sure we’d talk about other things like trade too.”
The remarks came a day after The Wall Street Journal reported that Putin had proposed the trilateral meeting during an October 9 phone call with Trump, aiming for talks on ending Russia’s war against Ukraine on terms favorable to Moscow. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov did not deny the report and said such talks would be beneficial. Trump framed the idea as his own suggestion, tying it to his planned November visit to China, where the three leaders could meet on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen, scheduled for November 18-19.
But Trump then pulled the summit’s focus away from Ukraine entirely. “I would do it, not so much for Ukraine, because Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine. They haven’t been doing much — and the same thing with China,” he said. Asked whether he would meet with Xi and Putin without Ukraine’s president present, he answered: “Anything I can do to end the war, whether somebody’s there or not.”
In the same remarks, Trump escalated his feud with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, declaring: “Zelensky doesn’t know what he’s talking about. To be honest, I think it’s time for somebody else to negotiate on behalf of Ukraine.” The outburst followed Zelensky’s accusation that Washington is deliberately holding back air-defense missiles — telling US senators on Monday that the Pentagon is delaying interceptor deliveries already paid for by European countries and that European governments stand ready to hand over Patriot interceptors from their own stockpiles pending American approval. “The missiles are ready, and they could already be in Ukraine,” Zelensky said. “But unfortunately, there is still no approval.” Kyiv also said it received no early warning from its partners before Russia’s latest missile strikes on its energy infrastructure, which left more than 500,000 people without power.
Tensions between Washington and Kyiv have been building since Trump partially lifted sanctions to strike a diesel-supply deal with Putin, prompting Zelensky to warn that the US leader was on the “wrong side of history.” Trump defended the deal on Monday: “I’m supporting stopping the war between Russia and Ukraine.” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has denied that Washington changed its intelligence-sharing with Kyiv, and Trump denied ordering any slowdown of the US government-owned Starshield satellite network after its operator, SpaceX chief Elon Musk, said such an order could only have come from the White House.
The idea of a Trump-Xi-Putin summit has unsettled Ukraine. Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha warned that such a meeting “would only encourage Putin to continue this war.” China, for its part, has not objected to the idea, according to people familiar with recent discussions — though Beijing has refused to join arms-control talks in the past, and it is unclear whether Xi would agree to Trump’s denuclearization agenda. Notably, since the New START treaty between Washington and Moscow expired in February, there are no legally binding limits on the long-range nuclear arsenals of either country, and no substantive talks on a successor deal.
Why this matters beyond Ukraine: a summit of the leaders of the world’s three largest nuclear arsenals would be unprecedented. With no treaties currently capping American and Russian long-range weapons — and China’s arsenal growing — the stakes of any three-way bargain extend far past Europe. Trump’s reframing of Putin’s Ukraine-summit proposal into a denuclearization meeting, coupled with his public suggestion that Zelensky should be sidelined from negotiations, marks the deepest rupture between Washington and Kyiv since the war began, and raises the prospect that the terms of Europe’s biggest conflict in decades could be discussed in a room Ukraine is not in.
Related: Putin Proposed a Trump–Xi Summit to End the Ukraine War — With No Zelensky at the Table · Zelensky Accuses US of ‘Slowing Down Support’: Offers 30-Day Refinery Pause for Patriot Missiles
