“Even if the president wants to take a step forward, there are a lot of restraints placed on him by other institutions, a lot of checks,” Mr. Putin said of Mr. Trump. He added that he hoped the two could focus on “getting the relationship between the countries on a normal track in all spheres, including the economy.”

Trump administration officials said last week that the meeting had no formal agenda, but the two have plenty to talk about if they choose, including Iran, North Korea, Syria and Ukraine. Paul N. Whelan, a Trump supporter imprisoned by Russia on spy charges, last week publicly pleaded for Mr. Trump to raise his case. On top of that, The New York Times reported last week that the United States has been stepping up digital incursions into Russia’s electric power grid in a demonstration of American capacity to deploy cybertools more aggressively.

Even so, the dynamics of the Trump-Putin meeting are a sign of how diminished Mr. Trump’s ambitions have become when it comes to Russia some two and a half years into his presidency. Rather than transforming the relationship from the hostility of recent years, as he once hoped, the main initiative aides have mentioned in recent days is a new arms control treaty he would like to negotiate with Russia and China, a notion that, in the view of experts, seems like a long shot at best.

The idea of pivoting the relationship toward arms control also seems paradoxical given the Trump administration’s moves to dismantle the Russian-American security architecture that has limited nuclear arsenals for years. In February, Mr. Trump pulled the United States out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, negotiated by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987, after accusing Moscow of violating its terms. The withdrawal becomes effective at the beginning of August.

At the same time, the administration has signaled in recent days that it plans to let the New Start treaty, negotiated by Barack Obama, expire in February 2021 rather than renew it for another five years. John R. Bolton, the president’s national security adviser, who met with his Russian counterpart, Nikolai Patrushev, in Jerusalem this week, said before leaving Washington that “there’s no decision, but I think it’s unlikely” the treaty would be renewed.

Mr. Bolton, a longtime skeptic of arms control agreements, said that New Start was flawed because it did not cover short-range tactical nuclear weapons or new Russian delivery systems. “So to extend for five years and not take these new delivery system threats into account would be malpractice,” he told The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative outlet.