Monday’s meeting with Putin was marked by far friendlier words. At one point, Putin gave Trump a soccer ball, which the American president playfully tossed to his wife in the audience.

“It seems to me that this is the summit that Putin was waiting for his entire life,” Alina Polyakova, an expert on Russia at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., said in a conference call with reporters.

She added: “I think he completely set the agenda at the summit. It was telling that the U.S. president did not mention Ukraine or Crimea once. The U.S. president also didn’t mention U.S. sanctions and basically let the Russian president set the agenda on Syria and other items as well.”

Trump also deflected direct questions about Russia’s role in the 2016 elections, and declined to denounce Russia for interference when asked. Instead, he seemed to praise Putin. “I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial,” Trump said. When the Russian president was asked if he supported Trump during the election, he replied: “Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Because he talked about bringing the U.S.–Russia relationship back to normal.” He rejected the idea of any interference in the election process, however.

Trump boasted about the margin of his election victory over Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee whom polls favored to win; reiterating his claim that the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into Russia’s actions and possible collusion between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia was a “witch hunt” directed at him; and asking why the FBI “never took the [hacked] server” belonging to the Democratic National Committee.

“I really believe that this will probably go on for a while, but I do not think it can go on without finding out what happened to the server,” he said, adding: “Where are those servers? They are missing. What happened to Hillary Clinton’s emails, 30,000 emails … just gone. In Russia they would not be gone so easily. It is a disgrace we cannot get Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 emails.”

The news conference capped a week of drama that led up to Monday’s summit meeting in Helsinki, the Finnish capital, between Trump and Putin. The meeting occurred just days after the U.S. Justice Department announced indictments against 12 Russian intelligence officers who are alleged to have hacked the emails and computers of senior Democratic Party officials in an attempt to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. The indictments, which are part of Mueller’s investigation into Russian hacking of the election, led to calls mainly from Democratic lawmakers for Trump to cancel his summit meeting with Putin.

But the U.S. president pressed ahead, reiterating his goal of improved relations with Russia. “Getting along with Russia is a good thing not a bad thing,” he said Monday ahead of his one-on-one meeting with Putin, who was seated beside him. That meeting was scheduled to last 45 minutes, but went on for more than two hours. Putin arrived more than 30 minutes late.