By Felicia Sonmez and Anton Troianovski | Washington Post

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump is willing to visit Moscow, the White House said Friday, hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin said Trump “has such an invitation.”

The statement comes as Trump’s apparent eagerness to embrace Putin is coming under increasing scrutiny after the summit between the two leaders last week in Helsinki.

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“President Trump looks forward to having President Putin to Washington after the first of the year, and he is open to visiting Moscow upon receiving a formal invitation,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement.

On Wednesday, the White House announced that a planned follow-up meeting between Trump and Putin in Washington, originally expected to take place this fall, will instead be pushed to next year.

Putin said Friday that he was prepared to visit Trump in Washington and that he had also invited the president to Moscow. Either way, Putin said, the timing for such a visit had to be right – an apparent reference to White House claims that the next Putin-Trump summit needs to wait until after the conclusion of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign.

“By the way, he has such an invitation,” Putin said at a news conference at an international summit in Johannesburg on Friday, referring to the possibility of a Trump visit to Moscow. “I’m also prepared to come to Washington but, I’ll repeat, only if the appropriate conditions are created there.”

Putin also praised Trump, saying that “what is absolutely obvious is that he’s trying to keep his election promises,” according to the Interfax news agency.

The White House has taken steps in recent days to tamp down on the concerns over the United States’ Russia policy sparked by the Helsinki summit, where Trump appeared to side with Putin and cast doubt on the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Trump has since walked back his remarks.

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In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Trump “has a complete and proper understanding of what happened” in 2016.