Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday he is ready to go to Washington and has invited US President Donald Trump to Moscow, but there “has to be necessary conditions.”
“We are ready for such meetings, we are ready to invite President Trump to Moscow. He has this invitation already and I told him about it,” said Putin, speaking at the BRICs summit in Johannesburg.
It is not clear when Putin invited Trump to Moscow and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
But Putin’s comments come days after Trump invited Putin to meet in Washington later this year, before quickly backtracking and pushing a potential meeting until next year.
“The President believes that the next bilateral meeting with President Putin should take place after the Russia witch hunt is over, so we’ve agreed that it will be after the first of the year,” Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton said in a statement on Wednesday.
Less than a week earlier, the White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Trump had asked Bolton to invite Putin to Washington for a second round of meetings in Washington in the fall.
The Russian President on Friday also praised Trump, saying the US President’s “great virtue is that he always wants to keep his promises to his voters.”
“You can critique him for what he does and many people do that but one thing is clear — he is willing to fulfill his campaign promises,” Putin said, adding that he viewed their meeting earlier this month in Helsinki, Finland, as “useful.”