A Trilateral Summit Without Ukraine. Trump Hasn't Said No Yet.

Overnight Saturday into Sunday, Ukraine launched what Moscow says was the largest one-night drone attack of the entire war, just as weekend reporting revealed talk of a trilateral summit reshaping the diplomacy. Russia's Defence Ministry claimed it destroyed one thousand fifteen Ukrainian drones across more than a dozen regions, plus Crimea and the Black Sea, a figure CNN described as the largest one-night count Moscow has ever published. Fires broke out at the Petersburg Oil Terminal, an oil depot in Ruchi, an Ozon logistics center and a VK data center, as Zark News reported in its weekend briefing. Officials reported a fatality, five wounded residents, and outages for around twenty thousand people in the Leningrad region.

Hours later, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to accuse Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of not wanting the war to end. "He doesn't want to end this war, and probably never did," Trump wrote, adding that he is in the process of negotiating peace and does not want to, as he put it, drive Russia foolishly away from the bargaining table, insisting that great progress is being made.

Zelensky pushed back on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday, warning that Washington siding with Russia would be a "historic mistake" and calling the sanctions waiver "more support for Russian aggression." He also said that since Trump's energy ceasefire took hold a week ago, Russia has struck Ukraine's energy and oil and gas sectors seventy-six times, with two thousand seven hundred attack drones, one thousand seven hundred aerial bombs and sixty-six missiles in the past week, leaving eleven dead and around fifty injured in Russian strikes in a single day. That ceasefire itself had come as a surprise earlier this month, as GenZNewZ reported at the time.

A trilateral summit without Kyiv

The Wall Street Journal reported via Reuters on Sunday that Russian President Vladimir Putin has proposed a trilateral summit with Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping to discuss ending the war on Moscow-favored terms. Putin floated the idea during an October 9 phone call with Trump, suggesting the meeting happen on the sidelines of the APEC gathering in Shenzhen on November 18 and 19. Zelensky is not invited.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed that talks are underway, while a senior United States official said Trump has not agreed but could be receptive. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, asked about the proposal during a visit to Uzbekistan, confirmed that there have been talks of a meeting and said the president would like the war to end. Analysts quoted in coverage of the Journal's exclusive said Xi would see the gathering as a chance to elevate China as a diplomatic power broker between Washington and Moscow.

Concessions before the handshake

The trilateral summit idea did not appear out of nowhere. During that same October 9 call, the two sides agreed that the United States would purchase Russian diesel fuel and help distribute it on global markets, while the Trump administration halted implementation of major congressional sanctions on Russia's energy sector. Then on Friday, Trump signed an executive order waiving sanctions mandated by Congress under the bipartisan Graham Act, including penalties on Russian diesel imports, just days before they were due to take effect. Secretary of State Rubio announced a sixty-day review of the sanctions' impact. The administration had been signaling this direction for weeks, as noted in GenZNewZ's earlier reporting on the waiver.

A dozen senators from both parties condemned the move while Congress sits in recess until after November 3, though Senator James Lankford defended it on Meet the Press as choosing the American people first, with gas prices soaring. The waiver lands at the pump: it is aimed at fuel costs, and seventy-one percent of adults already call gasoline unaffordable, according to figures cited in Zark News' reporting.

United States intelligence sharing with Ukraine was blocked for three days during Russian ballistic attacks before being restored, CNN reported, and a Ukrainian source told CNN there was no early warning before Sunday's ballistic attack on Kyiv, the third in a week. Zelensky also claimed that Starlink drone-guidance speeds had been curtailed as a message from the American government, which the Trump administration denies.

Deciding a country without it

A trilateral summit of the leaders of the world's three largest powers, deciding the fate of a sovereign nation that is not in the room, would be without precedent. European capitals, which Moscow regards as the main obstacle to a Kremlin-friendly settlement, are already alarmed. The format would hand Russia exactly what it has wanted: terms negotiated by great powers, with Kyiv and Europe outside the door.

The sequence is worth reading in order. Sanctions waived, diesel bought, intelligence briefly cut, blame pointed at Kyiv, and now a trilateral summit on the calendar with Ukraine's seat missing. The White House has even demanded that Ukrainian forces stop their long-range drone strikes on Russian oil refineries, the one pressure tactic that just gave Moscow its worst weekend of the war. For a generation that watches world events on its phones, the message is blunt: the shape of any peace may be decided by three leaders in Shenzhen, and the country it affects most may not be consulted.

What happens on November 18 will show how far Washington is willing to drift toward Moscow's preferred settlement. A trilateral summit that excludes Ukraine would tell every smaller country the same thing: in the end, the map gets drawn by the powers in the room.