‘Nothing bad is going to come out of it’
Donald Trump has set the bar exceptionally low ahead of his summit with Vladimir Putin in Finland.
The US president told reporters “nothing bad is going to come out of it.”
Trump’s meeting in Helsinki is the first set of unilateral talks between the two countries since Obama hosted Dmitri Medvedev in 2009, having refused a one-on-one summit since in protest at Russia’s invasion of Crimea.
He did however meet Putin individually at the 2016 meeting of the G20 in China.
Trump said he has “low expectations” of the summit and “maybe some good will come of it.”
“Nothing bad is going to come of it.”
The president also called the EU one of America’s “foes,” alongside Russia and China.
He said: “I think the European Union is a foe, what they do to us in trade. Now you wouldn’t think of the European Union but they’re a foe.
“In a trade sense, they’ve really taken advantage of us and many of those countries are in Nato and they weren’t paying their bills and, you know, as an example a big problem with Germany.
“Russia is a foe in certain respects. China is a foe economically, certainly they are a foe. But that doesn’t mean they are bad. It doesn’t mean anything.
“It means that they are competitive.”
Back in America, Robert Mueller has indicted 12 Russian intelligence officials for hacking during the 2016 election.
