Trump-Putin summit: US president says he has 'low expectations' of Helsinki meeting with Russian leader

Senator Mark Warner says that he is worried Mr Putin will 'try to cut some deal, and frankly, take advantage' of Mr Trump

Donald Trump has said that he is going into his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Finland with “low expectations” amid fears the president’s reliance on his personality to get results will lead to Moscow “taking advantage” of him.

Trump administration officials have sought to play down the idea of the meeting on Monday being a summit, with a lack of an official agenda and seemingly little idea of how it will play out.

“I go in with low expectations,” Mr Trump said one day after deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein announced the indictment of 12 Russians for their alleged attempts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. “I’m not going with high expectations.”

Asked about his goals for the meeting during an interview aired on CBS’ Face the Nation, Mr Trump said only, “I’ll let you know after the meeting,” promising “nothing bad” is going to come out of the discussion.

​“I think it’s a good thing to meet. I do believe in meetings. I believe that having a meeting with Chairman Kim was a good thing,” Mr Trump said, referring to his summit last month with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. “I think having meetings with the president of China was a very good thing. I believe it’s really good. So having meetings with Russia, China, North Korea, I believe in it. Nothing bad is going to come out of it, and maybe some good will come out.”

There is little dispute in the US that meeting with Mr Putin is a good idea, given the number of issues to discuss – including Moscow’s actions in Syria and Ukraine, the alleged election meddling and general relations.

US Ambassador to Russia, John Huntsman, told CNN: “There’s a lot more to talk about, strategic stability, Syria, Ukraine, North Korea, our bilateral relationship.We’ve got a fraught bilateral relationship. The collective blood pressure between the United States and Russia is off the charts high. So, it’s a good thing these presidents are getting together.”

However, it is the president’s style that is raising questions. Flying to Helsinki on Sunday, Mr Trump left diplomatic protocol in his wake – having made clear his thoughts on Brexit during his visit to the UK, and before that, admonishing his Nato allies during a summit in Brussels for the lack of money they put into the 29-nation Alliance compared to the US.

Senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner, is one of a number in Congress to raise the fact that Mr Trump will be speaking to Mr Putin one on one, as he initially did with Mr Kim. While Mr Trump has lauded the success of that meeting in getting North Korea to push on with denuclearisation, in reality the promises from Pyongyang have been very vague and there have been reports that North Korea has actually been seeking to upgrade its nuclear programmes.

“I’m very concerned about a one-on-one meeting between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump,” Mr Warner told CNN. “We know that Trump doesn’t do a lot of prep work for these meetings. He kind of goes in and wings it. We saw what happened when he did that with Kim Jong-un. He ended up saying everything is okay with North Korea, and frankly we’ve found, since that time, that’s not the case.”

Mr Warner added that he was worried Mr Putin would “try to cut some deal, and frankly, take advantage of this president”.

The uncertainty has not been helped by Mr Trump calling Mr Putin a “competitor” not an enemy, amid his own rancour over special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the presidential election and possible collusion with Trump campaign officials.

Mr Trump has called the investigation a “witch hunt” against him and his team that “harms” the US relationship with Russia, with his lack of a hardline stance on the meeting with Mr Putin seemingly aimed at highlighting he is willing to fix the US relationship with Russia despite what he sees as an illegitimate investigation.

Despite this, Trump administration officials have been much clearer about the belief they have in US intelligence agencies findings that Russia did meddle in the election, even if the Kremlin denies it.

John Bolton, the president’s national security adviser, told ABC News’ The Week that he finds it “hard to believe” that Mr Putin was not aware of an effort by Russian military intelligence officials to interfere in the presidential election

However, he played down any possibility of Mr Trump personally demanding Putin to hand over the 12 individuals recently indicted during their private meeting - particularly because of the lack of an extradition treaty.

“It’s pretty silly for the president to demand something that he can’t get legally,” Mr Bolton said. “The Russians take the position - you can like it or not like it - that their constitution forbids them to extradite Russian citizens.”

There are reports that that Mr Trump will warm to the same theme as he has with North Korea’s Mr Kim and push Mr Putin for a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Start) between the United States and Russia to continue decades of progressive nuclear disarmament between the two countries.

Mr Bolton added that the Trump administration would not look for “deliverables” – a set list of objectives – from Monday’s meeting, stressing that talks will be “unstructured”.

Mr Bolton said the summit will start with a “direct one-on-one conversation” between Mr Trump and Mr Putin and what happens from there “will be determined by the two parties”.