Rubio says he discussed a Trump-Putin meeting at APEC with Lavrov

A date and a venue would give the diplomacy a shape it has lacked, but Moscow has so far answered scheduling with harder terms.

Marco Rubio says he has spoken with Sergei Lavrov about arranging a meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin at next month's APEC summit. If it happens, it would give the diplomacy something it has lacked: a date and a place, in place of the open-ended phone calls and envoy shuttling that have filled October.

The record argues for caution. Putin has asked Trump and Xi for a three-way meeting, after weeks of Kremlin talk about a trilateral summit that produced no agreement, according to the Wall Street Journal. An offer of in-person talks with Volodymyr Zelenskiy went unconfirmed by Moscow, and the Kremlin has said a Putin-Zelensky meeting can only happen in Moscow.

Meanwhile Washington's own signals have pulled in different directions. On October 12 Trump said he believed Putin was ready to make a deal, days after his envoys told Ukrainian officials in Miami that Putin was not willing to negotiate. Trump also says he believes both Zelenskiy and Putin want the war to end, a claim his envoys have challenged in private.

Moscow's terms have not moved. The Kremlin says it wants a full peace settlement rather than a ceasefire, and its demand for the rest of Donbas stands. A source close to the Kremlin has said Putin would negotiate only after securing the remaining 11% of the region. On October 27 Putin spoke of considering an end to conflicts and the lifting of sanctions, yet Lavrov said the same week that the war will continue and is likely to escalate.

That is the pattern: scheduling progress has run alongside hardened Russian rhetoric and continued strikes, not in place of them. Team-level trilateral talks are planned for early November, and they will say more than the APEC announcement. A summit that Moscow does not commit to, or attends without shifting on Donbas, would add a photograph and little else.