US State Department acting assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs Tina Kaidanow is expected to travel to Turkey next week to offer Ankara the US Patriot surface-to-air missile system, Turkey's Sabah newspaper has reported.
Kaidanow is expected to arrive in Ankara on March 31. A high-level US source told the newspaper that Washington envisions its Patriot offer as an alternative to the Russian S-400.
According to the source, the Trump administration has high hopes over Kaidanow visit, with Washington seeing arms sales as a component of its foreign policy.
Russia and Turkey reached a $2.5 billion agreement on the sale of S-400s in 2017, with the first batch expected to be shipped in late 2019.
Last week, a group of US Senators sent a letter to the State Department urging it to introduce new punitive measures against Russia if it sold S-400s to other countries, as stipulated in the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA).
NATO officials have claimed that the S-400 system is not compatible with the alliance's existing air defenses. Ankara, however, has countered this suggesting by pointing to Greece's complement of S-300s, which Athens bought in 1999.