US invites Vladimir Putin to Washington in 2019; schedule of Russian president's visit not yet finalised

Washington: United States President Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser John Bolton has announced that Russian President Vladimir Putin has been invited to visit Washington, DC in early 2019. [caption id=“attachment_5170611” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] File image of Vladimir Putin. AP[/caption] As per Fox News report, Bolton, while speaking at a press conference in Georgia on Friday morning, has said that the scheduling of the visit is yet to be finalised, but the Russian President would be invited “after the first of the year.” “We have invited President Putin to Washington after the first of the year for, basically, a full day of consultations.What the scheduling of that is we don’t quite know yet,” he said. Trump and Putin have held a summit in July in Helsinki, Finland which was touted to be a ‘great success’ by the US president. Russian president Putin had last visited the White House in September 2005. The then-President George W Bush had termed it ‘a new day in the long history of Russian-American relations, a day of progress and a day of hope’. During his visit to Moscow earlier this week, Bolton had also announced another meeting between the US president and his Russian counterpart on 11 November in Paris on the sidelines of the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I.