Trump, Xi and Putin to Hold First Three-Way Meeting in Shenzhen, White House Says

WASHINGTON, November 14, 2026 – The White House has confirmed that US President Donald Trump, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin will hold their first three-way meeting on Thursday, November 19, in Shenzhen, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit.

The announcement was made on Friday by White House assistant press secretary Olivia Wales, ABC News, the BBC and Bloomberg reported. Xi is hosting this year’s APEC gathering, which is due to take place on November 18-19 in the southern Chinese city, Bloomberg said. The Associated Press described the planned talks as an unprecedented meeting of the heads of the world’s largest nuclear powers.

Nuclear arms control will be the main subject. “The president has made it clear that, among other topics, he will discuss the reduction of nuclear weapons in the world, whose proliferation President Trump believes is very dangerous,” Wales told reporters, according to the BBC, Reuters and Channel News Asia. US officials said Trump also intends to raise the war in Iran, but does not plan to discuss Russia’s war in Ukraine during the three-way session, ABC News, Al Jazeera and Channel News Asia reported.

The talks come after the last major US–Russia nuclear arms treaty, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), expired in February. Trump rejected a Russian offer to keep the treaty’s limits in place for a further year and called instead for a “new, improved and modernized” agreement that would also include China, Reuters and the BBC reported at the time. Russia holds the largest stockpile of nuclear warheads, followed by the United States and then China, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, as cited by Al Jazeera and Reuters.

Expectations for an immediate deal are low. “We do not expect to get to any kind of agreement,” a senior Trump administration official told Reuters, describing the encounter as “the beginning of hopefully a conversation that can be productive going forward.” Reuters also reported that China has rebuffed earlier attempts to discuss nuclear arms with the United States and Russia, which hold much larger arsenals; Bloomberg likewise noted Beijing’s reluctance to negotiate stockpile limits.

Trump will first hold a bilateral meeting and working lunch with Xi on Thursday, ABC News, the BBC and Channel News Asia said. Officials said he is not scheduled to meet Putin separately. Wales said the three-way session would conclude Trump’s visit to China.

Before travelling to Shenzhen, Trump is due to leave Washington on Monday and arrive in the Philippines on Tuesday for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in Manila, according to ABC News, the BBC and Channel News Asia. ABC News and The Philippine Star reported that he is also expected to hold a bilateral meeting with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr on the sidelines of that gathering.

For Malaysia and other ASEAN members, the itinerary underlines how closely regional diplomacy is now tied to the strategic contest among the United States, China and Russia. The same trip will take the US president from a Southeast Asian summit, focused on peace, security and trade in the Indo-Pacific, to a first-of-its-kind nuclear discussion among the three largest atomic powers, hosted at an economic forum in China. Any shift in arms-control talks, or in the tone of US–China relations, would be felt across a region that depends on stable trade and a careful balance among major powers. Officials have, however, stressed that Shenzhen is intended as the start of a conversation rather than a meeting that will produce a new treaty.

Sources: Associated Press; ABC News; Al Jazeera; Bloomberg; the BBC; Reuters, as carried by The Hindu; Channel News Asia; The Philippine Star; and The Washington Post, November 13–14, 2026.

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