US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on Saturday that he has discussed with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov the possibility of a meeting between American President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin during the upcoming APEC summit, scheduled for mid-November in China, as reported by AFP.
“I briefly touched on the idea of our leaders having a conversation during next month’s APEC summit,” Rubio stated at a press conference held on the sidelines of a G20 meeting in Atlanta.
The APEC summit, which stands for Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, is set to be held on November 18 and 19 in Shenzhen.
Rubio clarified that he did not have a “formal meeting” with his Russian counterpart, but rather a “short exchange of words.”
In a separate press conference on Friday, Lavrov mentioned that he had a “quite pleasant conversation with Mr. Rubio, for obvious reasons brief (…). We discussed certain aspects of our bilateral relations as well as our cooperation within multilateral organizations.”
The presence of the Russian minister at the G20 meeting, of which Russia is a part, caused a stir among attendees, leading to the cancellation of the traditional group photo on Friday, as European delegates refused to stand alongside him.
