US President Trump will hold a trilateral summit with Chinese President Xi and Russian President Putin next Thursday on the sidelines of the annual APEC conference, reports NYP citing sources

Discussion expected to focus on developing a nuclear arms control pact.

Trilateral arms control formats are rare and have historically struggled to get off the ground: bilateral US-Russia frameworks have carried the load in past eras, and efforts to pull China into such talks have repeatedly stalled on asymmetry of arsenals and on Beijing's insistence that it not be bound by structures built for two larger powers. The venue fits an established pattern, sideline meetings at multilateral summits producing signalling value first and substance later, with the readout language, on-site versus expert-level follow-up, and any mention of verification doing the analytical work. The sourcing is a single outlet citing unnamed sources, and such stories have on previous occasions been walked back, downgraded to bilateral formats, or reframed by the parties involved; confirmation from official channels is the first tell. Where comparable arms control overtures have touched markets, the channel has been the geopolitical risk premium in defence names, safe-haven flows in the front end and gold, and in this case the broader US-China trade and tariff track, since summit optics have tended to bleed across negotiation portfolios rather than sit in a silo. Worth watching is whether the agenda widens beyond nuclear issues and how each side's readout differs, as divergent accounts have been the norm in episodes of this kind.