Diplomacy has its own grammar, and the grammar of empires runs to the passive voice. On Wednesday, 4 November, at the Foreign Ministry’s regular briefing in Beijing, a spokeswoman named Mao Ning said one sentence about something that has never happened before. “China is in communication with relevant parties regarding a meeting between the three heads of state,” she said. She did not name the parties, and she did not need to.

The three heads of state are Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. The place would be Shenzhen, in southern China, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, which is tentatively set for 18 and 19 November. Al Jazeera’s Nils Adler has set out what such an encounter could bring and what it could not. The three men have never met as a trio.

Relevant parties

Mao gave no agenda and no date. According to Meduza, it was the first time Beijing had confirmed it was negotiating such a meeting, and she was answering a question about a Financial Times report that officials of the three countries were discussing one. The idea did not start in Beijing. The Wall Street Journal reported that Putin put it to Trump in a phone call on 9 October. Ten days later Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov floated the prospect in public, and on Monday, 2 November, he said Putin’s APEC schedule was still being drawn up. “Work is under way to coordinate such a meeting,” Peskov said, adding that he hoped it would be settled soon.

That is the order of events: Moscow proposes, Washington listens, Beijing confirms, in the most careful words available.

Moscow’s photograph

For the Kremlin the image alone may be the prize. Alexander Bratersky, an analyst in Moscow, called it “a big event.” He said Pyotr Tolstoy, who chairs the foreign affairs committee of the Russian parliament, had compared it to a new Yalta, the 1945 conference that drew the map of post-war Europe. In Bratersky’s view Putin would appear “first among equals” and Ukraine would be pushed to the edge of the frame. “A meeting by itself will be a success,” he said, and something Putin could sell at home. A second round could follow at the G20 in Miami in December, although the Kremlin said in September that Putin might skip that summit in order to attend APEC. If nothing comes of it by Christmas, Bratersky said, “it will be just a photo op.”

A reflection, not a fact: the people Yalta is remembered for are mostly the ones who were not in the room. Whoever brings up the name now is either ignorant of that or counting on it.

Washington’s drama

Trump has said he is willing, on a condition that sounds like politeness: “If President Xi wants to have it, I’d have it.” He has said he would rather talk about nuclear weapons than about the war in Ukraine. Inderjeet Parmar of City St George’s, University of London, said Trump wants “a personal, high-drama encounter” in which he can play “the indispensable deal-maker” on Ukraine, trade, energy or arms control. “After the midterms the domestic political need for a foreign policy ‘win’ is real,” Parmar said. In his reading, the audience at home, and what he called Trump’s “eroding MAGA base”, matter at least as much as anything said in Shenzhen.

Bratersky described a weakened president, after Democrats won both chambers of Congress in the midterms. In his account that could cost Trump leverage if Congress votes money for Kyiv. A ruler who is losing ground at home tends to look abroad, where nobody votes.

Beijing’s reluctance

The host is the one who seems least keen. German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said he raised Ukraine with Xi in Beijing on 30 October and saw “surprise” on his face. Xi told him, Steinmeier said, that the three would probably meet, but not to discuss Ukraine. Xi called the war a European affair in which “Europeans must sit at the table.” China’s Foreign Ministry has dismissed trilateral nuclear talks at this stage as “neither fair, reasonable nor realistic.”

Put the positions side by side. Putin wants the war on the agenda, and the Wall Street Journal reported he hopes to use the format to end it on terms that favour Russia. Xi says the war is not his business. Trump wants to discuss nuclear arms, and Beijing calls that unrealistic. Strike out what each man refuses and not much is left except the meeting itself. Even so, Meduza, citing Bloomberg, read the timing of Mao’s statement, two weeks before the expected date, as a sign that Beijing is prepared to go ahead.

Those not invited

Parmar called the prospect “a clear break from the post-1945 pattern”, under which Washington first consulted its allies, and he warned that their interests could be traded away. He said fears of a ruling “G3” were “understandable but overstated in institutional terms”, since the three powers want different things on Ukraine, Taiwan, technology and the rules of the economy. For him the real danger is that great powers get used to settling matters over the heads of the people affected. Such moments, he said, “rarely produce stable order.”

In Kyiv, according to HNGN, the plan has drawn objections. Ukraine has watched this before, most recently when the American president suggested someone else should do its negotiating. Ukraine is not on the list of relevant parties. Europe isn’t either, though Xi’s own words leave it a seat at a table that is not this one.

Nothing has been signed. Peskov says the schedule is still being written. Mao Ning gave no date. The calendar says 18 November.