Russia is “open” to the possibility of President Vladimir Putin making a visit to Washington after US President Donald Trump made the surprise invitation on Thursday. With confusion still swirling around what the two men discussed behind closed doors in Helsinki earlier this week, Russian Ambassador to the US Anatoly Antonov said Friday it is important to "deal with the results" of their first summit before jumping too fast into a new one. He said he had not seen Trumps invitation himself, but that "Russia was always open to such proposals. We are ready for discussions on this subject." The Kremlin has the final say, but has not responded yet to Trump’s proposal. Antonov gave a few more details of what Trump and Putin talked about in Helsinki, but insisted that diplomatic discussions should remain discreet in order to be effective. He called Mondays summit in Helsinki a "key event" in international politics and laughed off suggestions that the two men made any "secret deals." Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced Thursday that Trump asked National Security Adviser John Bolton to invite Putin, and "those discussions are already underway." Trump earlier had tweeted that he looked forward to "our second meeting" as he defended his performance in Helsinki where the two leaders conferred on a range of issues including terrorism, Israeli security, nuclear proliferation and North Korea. "There are many answers, some easy and some hard, to these problems ... but they can ALL be solved!" Trump tweeted. The announcement came as the White House sought to clean up days of confounding post-summit Trump statements on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trumps public doubting of Russias responsibility in a joint news conference with Putin on Monday provoked withering criticism from Republicans as well as Democrats and forced the president to make a rare public admission of error. Then on Thursday, the White House said Trump "disagrees" with Putins offer to allow US questioning of 12 Russians who have been indicted for election interference in exchange for Russian interviews with the former US ambassador to Russia and other Americans the Kremlin accuses of unspecified crimes. Trump initially had described the idea as an "incredible offer." The White House backtrack came just before the Senate voted overwhelmingly against the proposal. It was Congress first formal rebuke of Trumps actions from the summit and its aftermath. In an interview with CNBC broadcast Friday, Trump defended his efforts to build a relationship with Putin, saying they got along well but their conversations were "not always conciliatory." Trump said he and Putin had a friendly rapport. "Look, the fact is we got along well,"added, while suggesting, however, that they did not agree on everything. "So I had a meeting that lasted for more than two hours. It wasn’t always conciliatory in that meeting," Trump said, without elaborating. "We discussed lots of great things for both countries, frankly."