US President Donald Trump pressed Chinese leader Xi Jinping to use Beijing's leverage over Moscow to restart stalled Ukraine-Russia-US negotiations during their summit last month, the South China Morning Post reported on 1 June, citing multiple people familiar with the talks.
Trump told Xi that Russia–Ukraine negotiations had collapsed and urged him to bring Vladimir Putin back to the table to deal with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, according to the SCMP. Washington was also "not happy" with Beijing's recent tightening of rare earth export controls, the outlet reported. The White House and the Chinese embassy in Washington both declined to comment.
The ask is the clearest sign yet that the Trump administration sees no path to ending the war it inherited without Chinese cooperation. Trump reportedly made the war a centerpiece of his foreign policy on returning to office in January 2025; talks between Moscow and Kyiv have produced nothing since the Istanbul round in July 2025 broke up without a ceasefire. Trump told Zelenskyy in March 2026 to "get on the ball."
Xi's private assessment of Putin
The Financial Times had earlier reported that during the same summit, Xi told Trump that Putin "could come to regret" the invasion — the first time the Chinese leader is known to have offered a US president an assessment of Putin personally or of the war itself. A source familiar with Xi's meetings with former president Joe Biden told the FT those talks had been "frank and direct" on Russia and Ukraine but contained no such judgment.
The timing was pointed. Xi hosted Trump on 12–13 May, then welcomed Putin to Beijing on 19 May for a summit marking 25 years since Jiang Zemin signed the Sino-Russian friendship treaty. Putin had visited Xi three weeks before launching the full-scale invasion in February 2022, when the two leaders declared a "no-limits" partnership.
Trump's ICC pitch
Trump also proposed during the meeting that the United States, China, and Russia join forces against the International Criminal Court, telling Xi their interests were aligned, the FT reported. The Trump administration has previously accused the ICC of "politicization, abuse of power, disregard for US national sovereignty and illegitimate judicial overreach," with some officials describing it as an instrument of "lawfare against America." A White House factsheet published after the summit on 18 May made no reference to either the Putin discussion or Ukraine.
Battlefield reality behind the talks
The summit unfolded against rare Ukrainian gains. Kyiv has regained more territory in recent months than it had ceded in years, and a senior Ukrainian commander told Reuters last week that the Russian army was "exhausted and incapable of making breakthroughs." Russia answered with a massive aerial strike last month — 600 drones and 90 missiles, including the nuclear-capable Oreshnik hypersonic ballistic missile — while vowing further attacks on Kyiv.
"The brave Ukrainians… have reinvented warfare in much the same way the first world war reinvented warfare for the 21st century," Brendan Boyle, the Philadelphia congressman and lead Democrat on the US delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, told the FT. "Drone warfare has now become the norm and is revolutionizing the way we wage war."
The Biden administration repeatedly accused China of supplying dual-use goods that kept Russia's war machine running. The Trump administration has raised the same concerns, the SCMP noted, though less often.
