Russia's Ushakov says the preparations for a possible meeting between Russian President Putin and US President Trump at the APEC summit in November have not yet begun

Kremlin readouts on prospective summitry are a standard feature of this channel, and denials that preparation has begun have historically cut both ways: they have preceded both quietly arranged meetings and meetings that never happened, so the statement itself carries limited signal beyond confirming nothing is scheduled. The distinction that matters is between a bilateral and the floated trilateral format, since Chinese sponsorship of a Putin-Trump encounter would shift it from an optics event toward one with substantive agenda-setting on Ukraine and trade, the two axes through which such meetings have tended to transmit to crude, European gas proxies, and defense and sanction-sensitive equity names. Precedent with this pair of leaders is that headline risk runs ahead of deliverables: initial market moves on meeting announcements have typically faded when communiques produced no concrete framework. The tells worth tracking are whether the Kremlin's language shifts from 'not begun' to active preparation, any confirmation from the US side rather than Moscow alone, and whether pre-meeting staff-level contact on sanctions or energy emerges, which has been the usual sequence before anything priced as material.