Russian President Vladimir Putin plans to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in person for the first time in nine years, at a gathering hosted by Chinese President Xi Jinping. He is unlikely, however, to appear at the Group of 20 summit in the United States. Analysts read the contrast as a strategy of keeping distance from Washington, which is pressing Moscow to end its war in Ukraine, while drawing closer to Beijing.
The chances that Putin will sit down with U.S. President Donald Trump at the G-20 in Florida are very low, Bloomberg reported on the 22nd. Xi will host APEC leaders in Shenzhen, China, for two days starting Nov. 18.
Russian officials have floated the possibility that the meeting could produce an unprecedented three-way summit among the leaders of the world's three largest nuclear powers. Yuri Ushakov, foreign policy adviser at the Kremlin, said on Russian state television earlier this month that Putin and Xi had discussed the idea during talks at the recent Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Kyrgyzstan. He added that it would depend on whether Trump attends APEC.
Putin's foreign travel has been constrained by sanctions, security concerns and an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court in 2023 over the alleged unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children. Even so, he visited Mongolia, a party to the Rome Statute that established the ICC, in 2024. Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he has traveled to China, India, the United Arab Emirates, North Korea and Vietnam, as well as former Soviet states and the United States, where Trump hosted a summit in Alaska last August. It will be his first APEC appearance since 2017.
Putin has largely avoided multilateral settings where he could come face to face with Ukraine's European backers and countries such as Canada, Japan, South Korea and Australia. Appearing at APEC alongside some of those leaders could create a diplomatic burden for host China, but for Putin it could be his most public international stage since the war began in 2022.
Bloomberg reported that Russian officials expect little practical progress in negotiations on a war-ending deal before the G-20, and that frustration is growing with Trump's envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. There is also a risk that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy could make a last-minute appearance at the G-20. Sources said earlier that Putin has not backed away from his determination to seize all of Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region and believes Russian forces can achieve that within the next six months.
