Putin visit to America discussed as tensions simmer over spy row

The Trump administration says it is amenable to a White House meeting between US president Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, raising the prospect of the Russian president’s first Washington visit in more than a decade even as relations between the two powers have eroded.

Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the White House was among “a number of potential venues” discussed in Mr Trump’s telephone call last month with Mr Putin. The Kremlin said earlier Monday Mr Trump invited his Russian counterpart during the call.

Both sides said they had not yet started preparations for such a visit.

If the meeting happened, Mr Putin would be getting the honour of an Oval Office têteà-tête for the first time since he met President George Bush at the White House in 2005.

Alarms rang in diplomatic and foreign policy circles over the prospect Mr Trump might offer Mr Putin that venue without confronting him about Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election or allegations Russia masterminded the 4 March nerve agent attack on a former Russian double agent.

“It would confer a certain normalisation of relations and we’re certainly not in a normal space,” Brookings Institution foreign policy fellow Alina Polyakova said. “Nothing about this is normal.”

Much has happened since Mr Trump and Mr Putin spoke in the 20 March phone call.

Mr Trump said afterwards he hoped to meet with Mr Putin “in the not too distant future” to discuss the nuclear arms race and other matters. But their call was followed by reports the US president had been warned in briefing materials not to congratulate the Russian president on his re-election, but did so anyway.

Since the call, two dozen countries, including the US and many European Union nations, and NATO expelled more than 150 Russian diplomats in solidarity with Britain over the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, the former spy, and his daughter Yulia. Moscow has denied any involvement in the nerve attack. Trump administration officials have meanwhile said they were crafting a new legislative package aimed at closing immigration “loopholes” following the president’s calls for Republican politicians to immediately pass a border bill using the “nuclear option if necessary” to muscle it through.

Mr Trump has been seething over immigration since realising the major spending bill he signed last month barely funds the “big, beautiful” border wall he has promised his supporters.

The $1.3 trillion (£930 billion) funding package included $1.6bn in border wall spending, but much of that money can be used only to repair existing segments.