Putin, Trump could meet at APEC summit in China: Kremlin

Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump are likely to meet on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in China in November if both attend, Kremlin foreign policy aide Yury Ushakov said Sunday.

“If the leaders are at the same event, then it seems to me they will inevitably meet and talk,” Ushakov said in an interview with Russian broadcaster VGTRK.

According to him, there had been no signals or indications of plans for such a meeting yet, but the APEC summit is still about three months away.

“We have to live until then. Before that, we still have many major international events,” he said.

Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in a separate interview with VGTRK that NATO and EU countries would not be able to publicly distance themselves from providing military assistance to Ukraine and pursuing what he described as an anti-Russian policy.

Lavrov said Russia would take into account the actions of what he called “openly Russophobic elites” in Britain, Brussels, Paris, Berlin and other NATO and EU countries.

“They know what they are doing and are trying to publicly distance themselves from it in advance. It won’t work,” he said.