Putin plans to attend Xi’s APEC summit and skip G-20 with Trump

Vladimir Putin is set to travel to China for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit hosted by President Xi Jinping but is likely to skip the Group of 20 (G-20) in the US with Donald Trump.

The Russian president plans to take part personally in the APEC meeting for the first time since 2017, according to people close to the Kremlin. There’s only a very slim prospect of him joining President Trump for the G-20 in Florida, the people said, asking not to be identified because the matter isn’t public.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Xi will host APEC leaders in China’s Shenzhen on Nov 18-19. Russian officials have speculated about the prospect of holding an unprecedented trilateral meeting between the leaders of the world’s three biggest nuclear powers on the sidelines of the summit.

Kremlin foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov told Russian state television earlier in September that Putin and Xi had discussed the idea at talks during the recent Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Kyrgyzstan, adding it would depend on whether Trump decided to attend APEC.

Putin’s foreign travel has been constrained by sanctions, security considerations and a 2023 International Criminal Court arrest warrant over the alleged unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children. He nevertheless visited Mongolia in 2024, even though it is a party to the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the court.

Since the start of Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin leader has also travelled to China, India, the United Arab Emirates, North Korea, Vietnam and former Soviet republics, as well as to the US, where Trump hosted him for a summit in Alaska in August 2025.

Trump and Putin spoke briefly on the sidelines of the APEC meeting in Vietnam nine years ago, but did not hold formal bilateral talks. 

The Russian leader has largely avoided multilateral forums where he risks being confronted by Ukraine’s western allies in Europe and countries such as Canada, Japan, South Korea and Australia.

While his attendance at APEC alongside the leaders of some of those nations risks a diplomatic headache for the Chinese hosts, it would give Putin his most public international platform since the start of the 2022 war in Ukraine.

Russian officials expect practically no progress before the G-20 summit in negotiations on a deal to end the war, and they’re increasingly disappointed in Trump’s envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the people said. 

There’d also be a risk of a last-minute appearance at the G-20 by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Putin remains determined to seize control of all of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region and believes Russia’s army can achieve this goal in the next six months, the people said earlier. BLOOMBERG