US President Donald Trump on Monday proposed his plan to include Russia in an expanded G7 summit in a telephone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin said.
Trump “informed” Putin of his plan to hold a rescheduled G7 “with possible invitation of the leaders of Russia, Australia, India and South Korea,” it said, without making further comment.
The Kremlin called the conversation as a whole “constructive, business-like and substantive.”
The US president on Saturday said he would delay the G7 summit and hold an expanded event later, possibly in September, calling the current lineup of countries “very outdated.”
The meeting was due to take place via video conference this month, but Trump said he would delay it and aim to hold the gathering in-person instead.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov had told journalists earlier on Monday that “we don’t know the details of the proposal” and said Putin required “more information, which we do not yet have.”
Trump on Saturday told reporters on Air Force One that he had “roughly” broached the topic with leaders of the four other countries.
Russia was thrown out of what was then the G8 in 2014 after it seized Ukraine’s Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, an annexation never recognized by the international community.
The G7 major advanced countries — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US — hold annual meetings to discuss international economic coordination.
However, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday said that Russia would not be included in the group.
“Its continued disrespect and flaunting of international rules and norms is why it remains outside of the G7, and why it will continue to remain out,” Trudeau said.
On Monday, Putin also congratulated Trump on Saturday’s successful launch of a SpaceX spacecraft taking US astronauts to the International Space Station, the Kremlin said.
The leaders “confirmed a mutual intention to develop mutually beneficial cooperation in the space sphere,” it added.
Additional reporting by AP
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