‘Low expectations from Putin meet’

US President Donald Trump said he had low expectations for the Monday summit with Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin just days after 12 Russian intelligence officers were charged by a federal grand jury for hacking the Democrats ahead of the 2016 election.

The summit, which comes at one of the most crucial junctures for the West since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, has perturbed some European allies who fear Putin might seek a grand deal that undermines the US-led transatlantic alliance.

Trump, who has been preparing for the summit by playing golf at his Trump Turnberry course on the western coast of Scotland, told CBS in an interview that “nothing bad” would come out of the summit with Putin.

“I go in with low expectations,” Trump told CBS in Turnberry.

“I’m not going with high expectations.” A US federal grand jury charged 12 Russian intelligence officers on Friday with hacking Democratic computer networks in 2016, in the most detailed US accusation yet that Moscow meddled in the election to help Republican Trump.

Trump has repeatedly said the investigation into suspected Russian interference in the 2016 US election - which he casts as a “rigged witch hunt” - makes it hard for him to do substantive deals with Moscow.

But the charges shine an even brighter spotlight on Trump’s treatment of Putin, who has repeatedly denied that Russia sought to skew the election that Trump, a Republican, unexpectedly won. When asked by CBS if he would ask Putin to extradite the Russians to the United States, Trump said he hadn’t thought of that idea but that he might.

Russia’s constitution forbids the extradition of its own citizens.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Trump said.