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
Bus with Chinese tourists crashes through ice on Russia’s Lake Baikal, killing 8
- One of the Chinese tourists managed to escape from the bus
- The bus plunged into a 3-meter (10-foot) -wide ice crevasse
MOSCOW: A tour bus carrying Chinese tourists plunged through the ice on Russia’s Lake Baikal, killing eight people, officials said.
One of the Chinese tourists managed to escape from the bus, which was crossing the frozen lake on Friday, Irkutsk regional Gov. Igor Kobzev wrote in a Telegram post on Saturday. He said the dead included seven Chinese tourists and the driver.
The bus plunged into a 3-meter (10-foot) -wide ice crevasse, Russia’s Emergencies Ministry reported. The lake is 18 meters (59 feet) deep at the site of the accident, it said. The ministry said rescuers used underwater cameras before embarking on a diving operation.
The regional prosecutor’s office said a criminal probe had been opened. The Irkutsk tourism office reported on Saturday that the bus tour had been run by an unregistered operator.
Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest freshwater lake, is one of Russia’s key tourism attractions. Numbers of Chinese visitors to the country soared in recent years, after Moscow and Beijing introduced a mutual visa-free regime.
