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The world awoke this morning to learn of another detail from last month's phone call between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The Kremlin says Mr Trump invited the Russian leader to the White House. Here's why that has alarms ringing in diplomatic and foreign policy circles.
This was the 'DO NOT CONGRATULATE' call
The Kremlin says the invitation was extended during the same March 20 phone call in which Mr Trump congratulated Mr Putin on his re-election victory after being explicitly warned not to.
In briefing papers prepared for the President ahead of the phone call, Mr Trump was warned "DO NOT CONGRATULATE" Mr Putin, The Washington Post reported.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders says the White House was among "a number of potential venues" discussed in the phone call.
Both sides said they had not started preparations for such a visit.
But Mr Putin's foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov says it's "quite an interesting and positive idea".
But an analyst says 'nothing about this is normal'
White House welcomes are typically reserved for friends and allies.
Mr Trump has avoided criticising Mr Putin personally and experts are worried about the message a meeting between the pair sends in a time of increasingly strained relations between Russia and the West.
Since the call, two dozen countries expelled more than 150 Russian diplomats in solidarity with Britain over the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, the former spy, and his daughter Yulia.
And the offer comes in the midst of the ongoing special investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 US election.
"It would confer a certain normalisation of relations and we're certainly not in a normal space," said Alina Polyakova, a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution.
"Nothing about this is normal."
Experts say Trump is sending the wrong message to Putin
Former government officials also fear that when in direct contact with Mr Putin, Mr Trump is reluctant to raise difficult issues.
"I worry that [Mr] Trump wittingly or unwittingly may be sending a more positive signal to [Mr] Putin than he deserves," said Nicholas Burns, a top State Department official during the Bush administration who also served as US ambassador to NATO.
Michael McFaul, who served as the US ambassador to Russia under president Barack Obama, says the meeting would be in Mr Putin's interests.
"[The] symbolism of Putin standing in the East Room with the President at a news conference would be a major goal for the Russian leader," he said.
Mr McFaul said he feared that Mr Trump "thinks that a good meeting with [Mr] Putin is the objective of his foreign policy with Russia. That should never be the objective. That should be the means to achieve things that are actually of importance to the United States."
It wouldn't be Putin's first time at the White House
If the meeting goes ahead — and if the White House was chosen as the venue — Mr Putin would be getting the honour of a closed-door Oval Office meeting for the first time since he met president George W Bush in 2005.
Mr Trump has met Mr Putin twice as President, at the G20 summit in Germany last year and briefly at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit in Vietnam in November.
Mr Putin, who was president of Russia once before, visited the White House in 2005, when Mr Bush welcomed him in the East Room as "my friend".
But during Mr Obama's presidency, meetings between the US president and Russian leader occurred at international summits and along the sidelines of the United Nations gathering in New York.
Mr Putin has been to other parts of the US frequently in recent years, including a visit to the Bush family compound in Maine.
Mr Obama met former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev at the White House in 2010, when the pair also chowed down on burgers at a popular hamburger joint outside the capital.
Topics: donald-trump, world-politics, united-states, russian-federation
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