14:35

Guardian Moscow correspondent Shaun Walker writes:

Vladimir Putin is likely to count the format and tone of his long meeting with Donald Trump as a win – even if nothing much of substance was discussed.

Russia’s election hacking was raised during the meeting, but it does not appear to have taken top billing. US secretary of state Rex Tillerson said Trump was “rightly focused on how do we move forward” from the issue, while Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov even claimed Trump had told Putin he accepted the Russian leader’s denials of involvement.

Setting up a working group on non-interference in future elections – as Tillerson said had been agreed – is hardly likely to reassure those in Washington worried about Russia’s actions.

A trustworthy account of exactly how the meeting went down is unlikely to surface: another win for Putin was the makeup of the room. In addition to the two presidents, the only people present were the respective foreign ministers and two translators. This means there is no chance of leaks, as happened when Lavrov visited the White House in May and it later emerged that Trump had shared sensitive intelligence with the Russians.

The personalised format of the meeting excluded those in Trump’s team who are more sceptically minded on Russia, such as national security adviser HR McMaster, and Trump’s senior Russia adviser Fiona Hill, a longstanding Russia expert.

Russian television emphasised the length of the meeting, which ran more than four times over its scheduled half-hour length, as a sign of Russia’s importance. The news of a US-Russia agreement on a ceasefire in southwestern Syria, announced as the meeting was ongoing, is an example of the kind of top-table diplomacy Putin would like to do with Trump.

Putin looked impassive, but he would have been smiling inside. As journalists were hurried out of the room, Putin appeared to gesture to Trump and ask if these journalists were the ones who had insulted Trump, laughing at his own joke.

Presumably Putin had been briefed that a disdain for supposed “fake news” would be a promising area of potential common ground with the US president.