US President Donald Trump has hit back after facing fierce criticism over his summit with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.
He said the meeting had gone “even better” than the recent Nato summit.
After talks with Mr Putin, he contradicted his own intelligence agencies by saying he could not see any reason why Russia would meddle in the 2016 US election that he won.
The remarks have angered even some of his supporters.
In a tweet, Mr Trump alluded to last week’s Nato summit, which ended with him saying he had secured extra money for defence – something disputed by allies in the Western military alliance.
What did he say at the summit with Putin?
On Monday the US and Russian presidents held nearly two hours of one-on-one talks without their advisers in the Finnish capital Helsinki.
At a news conference afterwards, Mr Trump was asked if he believed his own intelligence agencies or the Russian president when it came to allegations of meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
“President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be,” he replied.
The US president was also asked whether he held Russia accountable on any particular issue.
He declined to offer specific criticism, but said: “I think we’ve all been foolish. We should have had this dialogue a long time ago… And I think we’re all to blame.”
Mr Trump’s comments put himself out of step with US intelligence agencies, which concluded that Russia was behind an effort to tip the 2016 US presidential election against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, with a state-authorised campaign of cyber-attacks and fake news stories planted on social media.
Top administration officials have accepted this conclusion, such as former CIA director Mike Pompeo who is now Mr Trump’s secretary of state.
Some US politicians had called for the summit to be cancelled after 12 Russian military intelligence agents were indicted last week, accused of hacking Mrs Clinton’s election campaign.
Aside from questions over the election, the US and Russia remain far apart on major issues, such as the Syria conflict, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and the US backing for the UK over the poisoning of a former Russian spy.
In their response, many US politicians simply refused to accept an equivalence between the US and Russia.
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Source: BBC
