TBILISI: The White House has formally invited President Vladimir Putin to Washington, US National Security Adviser John Bolton said on Friday, returning to an idea that was put on hold in July amid anger in the US over the prospect of such a summit.
President Donald Trump held a summit with Putin in Helsinki, the Finnish capital, and then issued Putin an invitation to visit Washington in the autumn. But that was postponed after Trump was accused of cozying up to the Kremlin.
“We have invited President Putin to Washington,” Bolton said at a news conference during a visit to ex-Soviet Georgia, days after meeting Putin and senior security officials in Moscow.
It was not immediately clear if Putin had accepted the invitation, which is for next year.
Bolton, in a separate interview with Reuters, strongly criticized Russian foreign policy, saying Moscow’s behavior on the world stage was one of the reasons Washington had imposed sanctions on Russia and was now considering imposing more.
“It will be helpful if they (the Russians) stop interfering in our election ... get out of Crimea and the Donbass in Ukraine ... stop using illegal chemical weapons to conduct assassination attempts against Russian exiles in the West, and if they would be less intrusive in the Middle East,” he said.
Russia denies meddling in the 2016 US presidential election, sending soldiers and equipment to eastern Ukraine, and has rejected Western allegations it was behind the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Britain.
Putin last held a meeting with a US president on American soil in 2015 when he met Barack Obama on the sidelines of a UN General Assembly.
Trump’s earlier invitation to Putin sparked an outcry in Washington, including from lawmakers in Trump’s Republican party, who argued that Putin was an adversary not worthy of a White House visit.
Trump has said it is in US interests to establish a solid working relationship with Putin however.
Trump and Putin plan to hold a bilateral meeting in Paris on Nov. 11 on the sidelines of events to commemorate the centenary of the end of World War One.
Bolton said that the Paris meeting would be brief and more of “a base-touching exercise.”
“One of the most important subjects they will discuss is whether President Putin will accept President Trump’s invitation to come to Washington or will President Putin once again extend his invitation to President Trump to go to Moscow,” said Bolton.
“I think what President Trump would like would be more of an opportunity to discuss the issues at length and we’ll have to see when it gets on the schedule.”
US invites Putin to Washington, but says get out of Ukraine
US invites Putin to Washington, but says get out of Ukraine
- Trump’s earlier invitation to Putin sparked an outcry in Washington, including from lawmakers in Trump’s Republican party
- Russia denies meddling in the 2016 US presidential election, sending soldiers and equipment to eastern Ukraine
2025 among world’s three hottest years on record, WMO says
- All eight datasets confirmed that the last three years were the planet’s three hottest since records began, the WMO said
- The slight differences in the datasets’ rankings reflect their different methodologies and types of measurements
BRUSSELS: Last year was among the planet’s three warmest on record, the World Meteorological Organization said on Wednesday, as EU scientists also confirmed average temperatures have now exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming for the longest since records began.
The WMO, which consolidates eight climate datasets from around the world, said six of them — including the European Union’s European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and the British national weather service — had ranked 2025 as the third warmest, while two placed it as the second warmest in the 176-year record.
All eight datasets confirmed that the last three years were the planet’s three hottest since records began, the WMO said. The warmest year on record was 2024.
THREE-YEAR PERIOD ABOVE 1.5 C AVERAGE WARMING LEVEL
The slight differences in the datasets’ rankings reflect their different methodologies and types of measurements — which include satellite data and readings from weather stations.
ECMWF said 2025 also rounded out the first three-year period in which the average global temperature was 1.5 C above the pre-industrial era — the limit beyond which scientists expect global warming will unleash severe impacts, some of them irreversible.
“1.5 C is not a cliff edge. However, we know that every fraction of a degree matters, particularly for worsening extreme weather events,” said Samantha Burgess, strategic lead for climate at ECMWF.
Burgess said she expected 2026 to be among the planet’s five warmest years.
CHOICE OF HOW TO MANAGE TEMPERATURE OVERSHOOT
Governments pledged under the 2015 Paris Agreement to try to avoid exceeding 1.5 C of global warming, measured as a decades-long average temperature compared with pre-industrial temperatures.
But their failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions means that target could now be breached before 2030 — a decade earlier than had been predicted when the Paris accord was signed in 2015, ECMWF said. “We are bound to pass it,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. “The choice we now have is how to best manage the inevitable overshoot and its consequences on societies and natural systems.”
Currently, the world’s long-term warming level is about 1.4 C above the pre-industrial era, ECMWF said. Measured on a short-term basis, average annual temperatures breached 1.5 C for the first time in 2024.
EXTREME WEATHER
Exceeding the long-term 1.5 C limit would lead to more extreme and widespread impacts, including hotter and longer heatwaves, and more powerful storms and floods. Already in 2025, wildfires in Europe produced the highest total emissions on record, while scientific studies confirmed specific weather events were made worse by climate change, including Hurricane Melissa in the Caribbean and monsoon rains in Pakistan which killed more than 1,000 people in floods.
Despite these worsening impacts, climate science is facing political pushback. US President Donald Trump, who has called climate change “the greatest con job,” last week withdrew from dozens of UN entities including the scientific Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The long-established consensus among the world’s scientists is that climate change is real, mostly caused by humans, and getting worse. Its main cause is greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas, which trap heat in the atmosphere.
