China welcomes a U.S.-Russia meeting on a new accord limiting nuclear arms and hopes it will help create opportunities to realize complete nuclear disarmament, Chinese spokesperson Geng Shuang told a news conference on Tuesday.

Representatives from the United States and Russia are set to meet in Geneva on Wednesday to explore the concept of a new accord limiting nuclear arms that could eventually include China, senior U.S. officials said on Monday.

U.S. President Donald Trump has said that he would like to see a "next generation" arms control deal with Russia and China cover all types of nuclear weapons. He has broached the topic individually with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, including most recently at the G20 summit in Osaka last month.

Geng stressed that as the countries with the largest nuclear arsenals, the U.S. and Russia should continue to take the lead in making drastic and substantive reductions in their nuclear weapons in a verifiable and irreversible manner in order to create conditions for other countries to participate,

Regarding whether China will join the negotiations, Geng said that so far China hasn’t seen any premise to do so.

He added, however, that Russia had expressed its understanding of China's position on a so-called trilateral nuclear disarmament deal.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan will lead the delegation at the Geneva meeting, which will include Tim Morrison, a top aide at the White House National Security Council, and representatives from the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the National Security Agency, according to the U.S. officials.

Russia's deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, will lead the Russian delegation, the officials said.

"We actually feel that – touch wood – we’ve actually got to a point where we can try to start this again," one U.S. official said. "I say touch wood because we're always just one incident away from unfortunately things getting derailed."

(With inputs from Reuters.)