Putin proposes a summit with Trump and Xi next month to negotiate an end to the Ukraine war, the Wall Street Journal reports

The proposed table has three chairs, and Ukraine is not in one of them. President Vladimir Putin has suggested a summit next month with President Trump and President Xi Jinping of China to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the discussions and a former Russian intelligence officer briefed on the matter. The terms such a meeting would produce, the Journal reported, would favor Moscow.

The suggestion was not new this weekend. It was made, the paper said, in the October 9 telephone call between Putin and Trump that also yielded the diesel agreement, under which Russia supplies diesel to the world market with American facilitation, and it has since been followed by the executive order waiving the sanctions Congress wrote into the Graham Act. The Kremlin has proposed holding the three way meeting on the sidelines of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, set for November 18 and 19 in Shenzhen, China.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed to the Journal that discussions are taking place. There is no clear understanding yet regarding the meeting itself or its potential agenda, although all three parties acknowledge the hypothetical possibility of such a meeting taking place, he said. A senior American official told the paper that President Trump had not agreed to such a summit, but he could be receptive to the idea. The White House did not respond to a Reuters request for comment, and the Russian and Chinese embassies in Washington did not reply either, as of October 19.

What such a summit would mean is plain from its guest list. The two powers supplying and sanctioning, the power invading, and the power buying the energy would settle the future of the country being invaded, in the country whose president has not been invited to the conversation. Kyiv answer to the week diplomacy is already on the record: President Zelensky has called the sanctions waiver a strengthening of Putin war and a historic mistake in the making, and Ukrainian forces spent the weekend striking St. Petersburg. A proposal is not a meeting, and a meeting is not a settlement. But the proposal itself tells every capital watching which capitals Moscow believes the war will be settled between.