Trump sets expectations 'low' for summit with Putin

U.S. President Donald Trump says "nothing bad ... maybe some good" will come out of his summit Monday with Russia's Vladimir Putin in Finland, while the Kremlin says the meeting "will be difficult" because of "the extent of the disagreements" between the leaders.

When asked in a television interview, "What's your goal from the Putin meeting?" Trump said he's going into it with "low expectations. I'm not going with high expectations."

He told CBS News that he "hadn't thought" about asking Putin to extradite the dozen Russian military intelligence officers indicted this past week in Washington on charges related to the hacking of Democratic targets in the 2016 U.S. election, but said that "certainly I'll be asking about it."

But in tweets published as he flew to Finland for the meeting, Trump also claimed that no matter what the summit achieves, he'll face "criticism that it wasn't good enough."

"If I was given the great city of Moscow as retribution for all of the sins and evils committed by Russia over the years, I would return to criticism that it wasn't good enough — that I should have gotten Saint Petersburg in addition!" he tweeted.

He seemed to blame the media for this, repeating a notion he has expressed since his early days in office that "much of our news media is indeed the enemy of the people."  

The Kremlin has said the talks between Putin and Trump will be tough.

"They will be difficult and you know the extent of the disagreements on the agenda," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said earlier this week, according to Russian official news agency TASS.

'Unstructured' meeting

Trump and Putin will meet one-on-one, with no clear agenda, no advisers and no cameras.

The United States is not seeking "concrete deliverables" from the Trump-Putin meeting, a senior White House adviser said on Sunday.

"We have asked, and the Russians have agreed, that it will be basically unstructured. We are not looking for concrete deliverables," White House national security adviser, John Bolton, told ABC's This Week in an interview.

In recent days, Trump has outlined some of the items he'd like to discuss, including Ukraine. Though the president has said he was "not happy" about Russia's annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, he puts the blame on his predecessor, Barack Obama, and says he will continue relations with Putin even if Moscow refuses to return the peninsula.

Trump says he believes such get-togethers are beneficial. In the CBS interview, he cited his historic meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in June as "a good thing" and says "having meetings with Russia, China, North Korea, I believe in it."

The U.S. president taped the CBS interview Saturday in Scotland, a day before he was set to leave for Helsinki for the summit. CBS released excerpts on Sunday.

Can't force Russia to extradite

On the issue of the 12 Russian agents indicted in the U.S. this week, a potential hurdle to their extradition is that Washington has no extradition treaty with Moscow and can't compel Russia to hand over citizens, and a provision in Russia's constitution prohibits extraditing its citizens to foreign countries.

Trump is blaming the Democratic National Committee for "allowing themselves to be hacked."

Trump also said he and Putin would discuss the ongoing war in Syria and arms control, negotiations that White House officials have signalled could be fruitful.

But it is the matter of election meddling, including fears Russia could try to interfere in the midterm U.S. elections this fall, that could play a central role in the summit talks or loom even larger if not addressed.

In neither of Trump's previous meetings with Putin — informal talks on the sidelines of summits last year in Germany and Vietnam — did the U.S. president publicly upbraid the Russian leader, prompting questions about whether he believed the former KGB officer's denials that his intelligence agencies engaged in meddling.