A senior aide to Vladimir Putin says a three-way meeting between the leaders of Russia, the United States and China has been discussed for the APEC summit in China this November. If it happens, it would be a remarkable convergence of the world’s three most consequential rivals in a single room. The White House says it has no information about Trump even attending.

The possibility of the most closely watched meeting in global diplomacy was raised this week from an unlikely stage, a state television interview given from Bishkek. Yuri Ushakov, a senior foreign policy adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin, said that Putin, US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping could hold a trilateral meeting on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit this November. Asked directly whether such a meeting was possible, Ushakov replied, “Yes, this matter was discussed.” He added that all three leaders are expected to attend the summit, and that “if things go as planned, then the three will be able to have a meeting.”

The setting of the remark was itself telling. Ushakov spoke from the Kyrgyz capital, where Putin and Xi had just attended the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Eurasian bloc that has become a centerpiece of Russian and Chinese efforts to build an order less dependent on the West. To float a three-way meeting with Trump from that particular stage, immediately after a display of Russia-China solidarity, was a piece of choreography that carried its own message: that Moscow sees itself as a pivot able to convene both Beijing and Washington.

The venue for the potential meeting is significant in its own right. Russia, China and the United States are all members of APEC, the twenty-one-member forum for Asia-Pacific economies, and this year’s leaders’ summit will be hosted by China in Shenzhen on November 18 and 19. That Beijing is the host adds a layer of symbolism to any trilateral. Shenzhen, the special economic zone that grew from a fishing village into one of the world’s great technology hubs, is the showcase China has chosen to present itself to the world, and a Putin-Trump-Xi meeting held there would unfold on ground of Beijing’s choosing, a fact unlikely to be lost on any of the participants.

For all the drama the prospect invites, it rests for now on a single, carefully hedged Russian assertion, and the caveats are substantial. The most important is that the United States has not confirmed it. Asked about the possibility, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said flatly, “At this moment, we have no information regarding President Trump’s participation in APEC.” That is a meaningful gap, as there is precedent for American presidents skipping the APEC leaders’ meeting even when the United States is not the host, and at last year’s summit in South Korea, Trump did not attend the forum itself, with the United States represented instead by the treasury secretary, though he did hold a separate high-profile meeting with Xi on the sidelines of his broader trip. The Kremlin’s framing, that the three leaders will meet “if things go as planned,” quietly acknowledges that the plan is far from settled.

Still, the mere floating of the idea matters, because of what a trilateral of this kind would represent. A meeting of Putin, Trump and Xi would bring together the leaders of the three powers whose relationships define the current international moment: a Russia waging the largest war in Europe since 1945, a China locked in strategic competition with Washington across trade, technology and the Pacific, and a United States whose current president has made unpredictability itself an instrument of policy. These three men rarely occupy the same space, and the questions that divide them, the war in Ukraine, tariffs and technology restrictions, the future of Taiwan, the architecture of the global economy, are precisely the ones that will shape the coming decade. A single photograph of the three together would, regardless of what was said, signal that the management of the world’s most dangerous rivalries still runs through personal diplomacy at the very top.

It is worth being clear-eyed about why Moscow in particular would relish such a meeting. For Putin, a seat at a three-way table with the American and Chinese presidents would be a powerful assertion of Russia’s status as a first-rank power, an image of Moscow as one of three indispensable capitals rather than an isolated power. The Kremlin has an obvious interest in projecting exactly that impression, and in being seen as the party that proposed the encounter. That does not mean the meeting will not happen, or that it would lack substance if it did. But it does mean the announcement should be read partly as positioning, a bid by Moscow to shape perceptions before anything has been agreed.

Whether the trilateral materializes will depend, above all, on decisions in Washington that have not yet been made, and on the tangled state of relations among the three at the moment the summit opens in November. For now, what exists is a possibility, raised by one side, unconfirmed by another, and rich with implication for all three.

If the leaders of Russia, the United States and China do sit down together in Shenzhen this autumn, it will be one of the most significant diplomatic images of the year. If they do not, the mere fact that the Kremlin chose to raise it, from the stage of a summit devoted to a world beyond Western dominance, will remain a revealing glimpse of how Moscow wishes to be seen.

By I. Constantin