Russian dictator Vladimir Putin plans to travel to China for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, which will be hosted by Chinese President Xi Jinping, but will likely skip the Group of Twenty (G20) summit in the United States, where Donald Trump will be present. Bloomberg reports this, UNN writes.
Details
According to people close to the Kremlin, the Russian president plans to personally attend the APEC meeting for the first time since 2017. They noted that the likelihood of his attending the G20 summit in Florida together with President Trump is extremely low. The sources asked not to be named because the matter is not public.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov did not respond to a request for comment.
Xi Jinping will host APEC leaders in Shenzhen, China, on November 18–19. Russian officials had suggested the possibility of an unprecedented trilateral meeting of the leaders of the world's three largest nuclear powers on the sidelines of the summit.
As Bloomberg notes, Putin largely avoids multilateral forums where there is a risk of encountering Ukraine's Western allies from Europe, as well as representatives of countries such as Canada, Japan, South Korea, and Australia. In addition, there is a risk that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy could make an unexpected appearance at the G20 summit.
At the same time, attending the APEC summit would give him the most prominent international platform since the start of the war in Ukraine in 2022.