Vladimir Putin has said he thought Donald Trump believed his denials of Russian meddling in the 2016 US election, following the two presidents’ first face-to-face meeting on Friday.

Speaking after the G20 summit of leading economies, the Russian leader said his US counterpart had asked him numerous questions about Russia’s alleged interference in the presidential election during a lengthy discussion of the issue.

Putin said he thought his answers had satisfied Trump, but he added that Trump’s opinion would be better sought from the US president himself.



“[Trump] asked a lot of questions on this subject,” Putin said. “I, inasmuch as I was able, answered these questions. It seems to me that he took these [answers] on board and agreed with them, but in actual fact, it’s best to ask him how he views this.”

Pressed again later in the news conference by reporters about what precisely Trump had told him, Putin said: “He started to ask pointed questions; he was really interested in particular details. I, as much as I could, answered him in a fairly detailed way.

“I believe it would not be entirely appropriate on my part to disclose details of my discussion with Mr Trump. He asked, I answered him. He asked pointed questions, I answered them. It seemed to me that he was satisfied with those answers.”

Earlier, a spokesman for Putin had addressed the conflicting accounts of the discussions between Putin and Trump on what US intelligence agencies are convinced was Russia’s meddling to sway the election in favor of Trump.

The Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, had told reporters after Friday’s meeting that Trump had accepted Putin’s assurances that Moscow didn’t interfere with the election – an account that appeared at odds with that of the US secretary of state, Rex Tillerson.

Asked about the conflict on Saturday, Dmitry Peskov joked: “Trust Lavrov. I don’t work for Tillerson.”

Speaking alongside British prime minister Theresa May at the G20, Trump said he and Tillerson had had a “tremendous meeting with” Putin. He did not answer shouted questions about whether Russia had lied about the content of the meeting.

Trump has said he believes that Russia may have hacked the emails of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton staffers, but that other countries were involved as well.

Putin also spoke warmly of Trump’s personal qualities. The two men have spoken by telephone since Trump won the US presidential election last year, but had not met until the G20 summit in Hamburg, although Trump has been contradictory about whether he had met Putin before becoming president.

“I believe that we have established personal relations already,” Putin told a news conference.

“The TV Trump is very different from the person in reality. He is absolutely precise, he reacts as you would expect to his interlocutor, he analyses fairly quickly, answers questions that are put to him.

“It seems to me that if we build our relations the way that our conversation went yesterday, then we all have grounds to believe that we can, at least in part, restore the level of cooperation that we need,” Putin said.

The Russian president said in particular that the Trump administration was taking a more pragmatic stance on the conflict on Syria. A ceasefire deal for southern Syria that was announced during the summit was the result of that new approach, Putin said, and represented a “breakthrough”.

Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, told CNN that, contrary to Trump’s equivocation on the issue, “everybody knows that Russia meddled in our election”.

Asked about the meeting between the two leaders, she said: “I think President Putin did exactly what we thought he would do, which is deny it. This is Russia trying to save face. And they can’t. They can’t.

“Everybody knows that Russia meddled in our elections. Everybody knows that they’re not just meddling in the United States’ election. They’re doing this across multiple continents, and they’re doing this in a way that they’re trying to cause chaos within the countries.”

Chuck Schumer, the top Democrat in the US Senate, said Trump and Putin’s meeting had been “the lowest moment” of a G20 summit which was “an embarrassment to our country and our ideals”.

“As our intelligence community has unanimously concluded – and as the American people agree – the president of Russia clearly and deliberately interfered in our elections and sought to undermine and destabilize our democracy,” Schumer said. “Rather than decisively confronting the Russian president head on, the president seemed to acquiesce to Putin’s denial, almost certainly paving the way for future Russian interference in our elections.”

The Senate minority leader added: “President Trump agreeing with Putin to form a so called working group on cybersecurity is like police officers and bank robbers agreeing to form a working group on bank robberies. And when President Putin and President Trump both laughed at and mocked the free press in unison, President Trump is coming uncomfortably close to accepting the same kind of authoritarian and autocratic norms in our society that Putin relishes in his.”

He called for the House of Representatives to pass a sanctions bill “to finally punish Russia for their intrusion in our 2016 elections”.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report