By David Lawder and Costas Pitas
Nov 8 (Reuters) – President Donald Trump said on Sunday he thinks he will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin at an APEC leaders’ summit in China next week and discuss ending the war in Iran and denuclearization.
Trump told reporters before flying back to Washington from Florida that he will travel to China for the APEC summit, set for November 18-19 in the southern tech hub of Shenzhen.
“One of the meetings, I think, will be with President Putin and President Xi, and that’ll be interesting. We’re talking a lot of things, including denuclearization, but we’ll be talking a lot of things. We’re trying to end the war in Iran,” he said.
Trump said in October that he was open to three-way arms control talks with Xi and Putin, which he said would focus on denuclearization.
The Wall Street Journal later reported that Putin has pitched using a trilateral meeting to discuss an end to Russia’s long-running war in Ukraine.
Trump said in an interview with CBS’ 60 Minutes program that “I believe we’re very close to making a deal” to end the Russia-Ukraine war that would result in a “little bit different shape Ukraine,” without offering specifics.
(Reporting by David Lawder , Costas Pitas and Jarrett Renshaw, editing by Michelle Nichols and Sonali Paul)
