MOSCOW, August 21. /TASS/. There is a need for expert discussions of the possibility of restoring the G8, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told TASS on Wednesday.

"Initiatives need to be outlined and handed over to Russia for consideration. At the moment, it is hard to understand what it is all about, so if the G7 wants to position itself as a serious platform, the discussion should be moved from the media field to the expert level," she pointed out.

US President Donald Trump told reporters on Tuesday that "it’s much more appropriate to have Russia in" [the G8]. According to a senior US administration official cited by CNN, Trump and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron held a telephone conversation on Tuesday and agreed that the Russian president should be invited to the G7 summit in 2020. According to CNN, Trump plans to broach the topic at a G7 summit scheduled to take place in Biarritz, France, on August 24-26.

The G7 is a group of industrialized nations that includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. The group was renamed the G8 in 1997 when Russia joined the club. However, following the 2014 events in Ukraine that created a crisis in relations between Russia and the West, the group’s western members decided to revert to the G7 model.