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The preparations for the first ever trilateral meeting between the leaders of China, Russia and the United States caused alarm in Europe, where they saw it as a repeat of the division of the world into spheres of influence after World War II. But it is still unknown whether the summit will take place at all, and if it does, what will be discussed at it. The topics proposed by Moscow and Washington are not of interest to Beijing, China experts say.
On Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin, visiting an exhibition with schoolchildren at the Moscow Manege, stopped by a large sculptural group. She portrayed Winston Churchill, F.D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference in 1945.
“But the leaders of the three main states got together to discuss how to organize the world after the war,” Putin told the children.
The day before, the Chinese Foreign Ministry and the Kremlin press service said that they were holding consultations about a trilateral meeting between Putin and US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping on November 18-19, when they gather in Shenzhen, China for the APEC summit. Trump has already publicly supported this idea.
Reports that the Kremlin was proposing to hold such a meeting appeared in mid-October. They immediately caused alarm in Europe and Ukraine, reminding many of the Yalta Conference in February 1945, when the leaders of the anti-Hitler coalition met in the former residence of the Russian emperors on the Black Sea. Roosevelt and Churchill obtained Stalin's agreement to enter the war against Japan after the victory over Germany.
In exchange, the USSR's sphere of influence was allowed to expand into Eastern Europe, and a secret agreement on East Asia was concluded, according to which the USSR received Japanese territories - South Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands - and also restored the Soviet base in the Chinese Port Arthur and special economic interests in Manchuria.
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Since then, in Eastern Europe, “Yalta” has become synonymous with the cynical collusion of great powers dividing the world into spheres of influence without regard for the rest - including the opinions of the countries whose territories they divided.
“I really don’t want this to be Yalta-2, 3, 4, when there is a redistribution of influence,” Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky commented on the news about a possible meeting. “I believe that after Alaska, this will be the second such diplomatic, serious advantage for Russia if everything happens exactly as the Russians are now “throwing in” regarding their desires for the new Yalta.”
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Negotiations to end the war in Ukraine must include European participation, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said: “Europe must and wants to play a role in this process. Key issues of a peaceful settlement, be it sanctions or security architecture, can only be resolved with the participation of us Europeans. And all participants know about it.”
War in Ukraine, nuclear disarmament or spheres of influence?
It is unknown what Putin would like to talk to Trump and Xi about. The Wall Street Journal wrote that his goal is to enlist support for ending the war in Ukraine on terms favorable to him.
“So far there are only outlines of what could be discussed at such a high level and in such an unusual format. I think Ukraine will be affected to one degree or another,” said Russian presidential aide Yuri Ushakov.
Trump has a different vision of the agenda for this summit. He said he was willing to meet with Putin and Xi, but not to talk about Ukraine: “We could meet to discuss nuclear weapons and nuclear disarmament.”
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China does not want to actively participate in negotiations about the war in Ukraine because it would create the impression that it is deeply involved in the conflict, said sinologist Joseph Torigian, an adjunct professor at American University in Washington. And participation in negotiations from which Europe is excluded will be an argument in favor of Beijing supporting Moscow in this war - a perception that China is trying in every possible way to avoid.
Beijing is also skeptical about negotiations on nuclear weapons, the expert notes: “One of the reasons is that Russia and the United States have significantly larger nuclear arsenals than China. Another reason is that the Chinese see a certain advantage of their relatively small nuclear potential precisely in its opacity. They prefer that other states do not know the exact scale of their nuclear program,” the expert adds.
Russia’s interest in such a meeting is obvious - not only to exclude Europe from negotiations on the war in Ukraine, but also to once again show that Moscow cannot be isolated in the international arena.
The attractiveness of the summit for the American leader is also clear. “Trump is excited about this idea primarily because of its ceremonial side and political atmosphere. He will be able to talk about how wonderful it is that the great powers have come together, that he was the first to organize such a meeting and that he brings peace to the world,” notes Torigyan.
The benefits of such a summit for Beijing are much less obvious. Torigyan recalls that the Yalta Conference is a painful memory not only for Eastern Europe, but also for China, whose fate was decided by the leaders of Great Britain, the USSR and the USA without his participation.
Stalin put forward strict conditions for the USSR to enter the war against Japan - in particular, Moscow achieved recognition of special Soviet interests in Manchuria. When the Chinese leadership found out about this, they were outraged.
“Even Mao Zedong, after the Communist victory in China in 1949, considered the Soviet demands put forward at Yalta and after it to be a serious source of disagreement. These contradictions partly explain the subsequent split between China and the USSR. Therefore, for the Chinese, Yalta is not at all a pleasant historical memory,” notes Torigyan.
And although the Yalta Conference effectively secured the USSR's sphere of influence, historians debate how much it was a concession to Stalin or an acceptance of an inevitable reality. By February 1945, the Red Army already occupied Romania, Bulgaria and large parts of Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
But in the Russian-Ukrainian war, unlike World War II, of the three potential countries participating in the summit, only one is directly at war - Russia. And unlike Eastern Europe in 1945, where the Red Army dominated after the Nazis were defeated, the Russian army now does not even occupy those territories in eastern Ukraine that the Kremlin has already declared as its own.
Finally, only Russia is interested in an unambiguous division of the world into spheres of influence, the historian believes. The US is not ready to give up its support for Taiwan. For Beijing, its presence in Latin America is important, despite the fact that the national security strategy adopted under Trump speaks of the Western Hemisphere as a US sphere of influence.
A matter of prestige
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Parallels with Yalta are also inappropriate because in the eyes of its own leadership, Russia has the status of a superpower on par with the United States and China - but not everyone shares this assessment.
“The only country that the Chinese leadership and elites truly consider China’s equal is the United States,” says Marcin Kaczmarski, an expert on Russian-Chinese relations at the University of Glasgow.
This is not always reflected in Beijing’s public rhetoric, the expert says; their equal status is often acknowledged in words: “But behind closed doors, neither Chinese experts nor the country’s leadership perceive Russia as an equal power.”
On the one hand, a trilateral summit could be beneficial for Beijing’s international prestige, says Kaczmarsky: the meeting will allow Xi Jinping to act as a world leader, to whom the heads of other powers come.
But China does not need Europe’s potential irritation from this meeting, the expert believes. Although Chinese elites have become increasingly disrespectful of the European Union in recent years, they remain interested in good relations with European countries as key trading partners.
Trump’s position on the world stage also became ambiguous after the defeat of the Republicans in the midterm elections to the US Congress.
“The question is: is China interested in helping to strengthen [Trump's] international status? So I’m still not sure that this meeting will take place at all,” says Kaczmarsky.
In the 2000s, when visiting Eastern Europe, US President George W. Bush several times declared the Yalta agreements a historical evil. The Russian leader was the addressee of these messages, the New York Times wrote at the time. Bush was sending a message to Putin: Russia has no right to interfere in the affairs of its neighbors and must apologize for the actions of the USSR. “No more Yalta!” - Bush proclaimed in Vilnius in 2002.
If, twenty-five years later, Putin gets the leaders of the United States and China to meet in a format at least vaguely reminiscent of the Yalta Conference, it will be a symbolic victory for the Russian leader.
Even if this meeting is devoid of any specific content.
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