A possible meeting of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump during next month’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation gathering is worrying America’s traditional allies and Ukraine, Bloomberg Opinion columnist Marc Champion writes. He says Putin has pressed for the summit for some time, including in an Oct 9 call with the US president, and that the Kremlin says preparations are under way.
Champion argues that one attraction for Moscow is that Ukraine and Europe, the two targets of Russian aggression, would be left out of a wider deal. He reports that US Special Envoy for Peace Missions Steve Witkoff this week took an updated ceasefire proposal, worked out with Ukrainian and European leaders in Oslo, to the Russian side. Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov dismissed it as lacking substance. Ushakov also said Russia might resume lower-level talks next month, ahead of a possible three-way meeting at APEC’s Nov 18–19 gathering in southern China.
The column says there is little prospect of a true negotiation until after the winter. Champion writes that Putin believes his advantage in the long-range air war will leave him, by next spring, with a reduced Ukraine that has either capitulated or been left in ruins, and that he would treat either outcome as a win.
Champion says Trump appears more focused on commercial gains from a US-Russia reset. He writes that Trump set aside evidence of daily Russian attacks on civilian targets and said Russia was “fine” on Ukraine and “hasn’t been doing much.” Witkoff, who met Putin on Wednesday, Oct 21, praised Russia’s president as “a humanitarian,” the column says.
Two days before that meeting, Champion writes, a Shahed-style loitering munition killed six people in a park in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region. The dead included a one-year-old girl in a stroller, her mother and two other children. Fourteen other people, including children, were wounded.
Champion says Trump is betting he can blame the war’s continuation on Europe and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and that Russian oil tankers carrying diesel toward the United States could help him politically before the Nov 3 midterms. For Putin, he writes, the aim since the 2022 invasion has been not only territory but a change in Europe’s security order that would restore Russian influence and great-power status. A meeting in China, with Xi as a close ally, would put Putin two-to-one on Xi’s home ground. Russian state media have floated Shenzhen as a second Yalta.
Champion notes that Trump has steered talk of any China summit toward nuclear arms control rather than Ukraine or spheres of influence. He calls arms control an important subject where US and Russian interests overlap against China, whose arsenal is growing quickly but is still far from parity. That gap, he writes, could make a deal acceptable to Moscow and Washington unattractive to Beijing, and is one reason the meeting might not happen.
The column compares earlier summits, from Munich in 1938 and Yalta in 1945 to John F. Kennedy’s 1961 meeting with Nikita Khrushchev, and argues Trump’s own record with Putin is poorly prepared. Champion also says US alliances in Europe and Asia are weakening, and that even a purely symbolic three-way meeting could distract from the fact that nothing was being done to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.