HELSINKI: Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin vowed a fresh start to troubled relations between the world’s greatest nuclear powers at their first summit on Monday, as the American leader rejected a chance to condemn Moscow’s alleged manipulation of US elections.
The US and Russian leaders came out of their meeting in Helsinki expressing a desire to cooperate on global challenges, after talks on an array of issues from Syria, Ukraine and China to trade tariffs and the size of their nuclear arsenals.
Standing alongside Putin at a joint news conference, Trump said he had “spent a great deal of time talking about” election meddling, without going into detail or explicitly condemning any interference, after 12 Russian agents were indicted in the United States.
Rather, when pressed about the verdict of his own intelligence chiefs, Trump stressed that Putin had delivered a “powerful” denial of any Russian vote meddling and said the US investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller had been a “disaster” for the United States.
Trump again denied any collusion between his campaign and the Kremlin.
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