However, speaking to reporters on Monday, a spokesman for Putin played down Trump’s comments and suggested that the U.S. leader may have misspoken.
“I wouldn’t make the assessment that Trump allowed that possibility and so on, as we’re reading in many media reports,” Dmitry Peskov said, according to Latvian-based news outlet Meduza.
“Here you’ve got to be very flexible with how you read the linguistic properties. It’s clear that there couldn’t have been a different answer,” the Kremlin spokesman said, adding that there was no credible proof implicating Putin in the Skripal case.
Trump made his remarks in a wide-ranging interview on CBS News’s “60 Minutes.” Interviewer Lesley Stahl told Trump that he never criticized Putin publicly.
“Do you agree that Vladimir Putin is involved in assassinations? In poisonings?” Stahl asked.
“Probably he is, yeah. Probably. I mean, I don’t…” Trump responded.
“Probably?” Stahl said.
“But I rely on them, it’s not in our country,” the president said, later adding that “of course they shouldn’t do it.”
The poisoning of Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in the English town of Salisbury has intensified scrutiny of Russian foreign policy. Sergei Skripal was a Russian military intelligence officer who was arrested in 2004 and convicted of high treason; he settled in Britain after a spy swap.
Both father and daughter have been discharged from the hospital.
British investigators say the Skripal attack involved the use of Novichok, a powerful nerve agent developed under the Soviet Union. After police released details of two men suspected in the poisoning, the men appeared on Russian state television and said they had simply been visiting Britain about the same time as the attack and had nothing to do with it.
The United States expelled 60 Russian officials and closed a consulate in Seattle in response to the attack, part of a wave of coordinated expulsions by Western allies. Moscow has repeatedly denied any role in the poisoning.
A number of Russian dissidents and Putin critics have died in mysterious circumstances in recent years. At least one of these deaths has occurred in the United States: Mikhail Lesin, a former ally of Putin, was found dead in a Dupont Circle hotel room in 2015.
Trump has previously deflected questions about Putin’s involvement in the death of his critics. In an interview with Fox News in February 2017, Bill O’Reilly told Trump that “Putin is a killer.”
“There are a lot of killers. We have a lot of killers,” Trump responded. “Well, you think our country is so innocent?”
In his interview with CBS News that aired Sunday, Trump said he had been “very tough” with Putin when the two met in Helsinki in July.
However, Peskov told journalists on Monday that the meeting had not ventured outside the realm of “diplomatic politeness.”
“All questions were put in a very straightforward manner. In this respect the meeting was really tough, because both presidents openly mentioned the irritants that exist in bilateral relations,” Peskov said.

On September 5, British Prime Minister Theresa May briefed parliament on the investigation’s findings to declare that two Russians carrying passports issued in the names of Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov were suspected accomplices in the assassination attempt. Britain regards both men as GRU agents. Petrov and Boshirov in an interview to the RT television channel dismissed the charges.
In late September, The Daily Telegraph claimed it knew the real name of the person suspected of the assassination attempt against the Skripals. The newspaper said that the man originally identified as Ruslan Boshirov was in reality Russian Colonel Anatoly Chepiga, a holder of several government awards. Later on, a Bellingcat representative told the British parliament that the real name of the man identified as Petrov was Alexander Mishkin.
Russian president’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov said following this publication that he had “no information that a man by this name has ever received any award.” Following Bellingact’s revelations about ‘Mishkin,’ Peskov said that the Kremlin would refrain from debates about medial allegations about Russian ‘GRU agents.’.

Above: Watch SCMP reporter explore dead drops in Hong Kong
There was a time when Hong Kong was a hotbed of spies: during the Cold War undercover agents from America, China, Britain and Russia were active here. Those days are over, but for Hong Kong’s espionage enthusiasts there is a new reason for some old-school spycraft: art.
Over the past five years, Berlin-based artist Aram Bartholl has reinvented the dead drop, for an ongoing global art project.
On his website, Bartholl describes the project as an “anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space,” and explains that he started it when he was artist in residence at the art and technology centre Eyebeam in Brooklyn, New York in 2010.

A USB connector sticks out of a wall. Photo: Dead Drop
He hid five USB thumb drives around New York City, often embedded in concrete walls or curbs with just the tip sticking out. The idea was for people to plug the bit of the USB sticking out of the wall into their laptops and find… well, just about anything.  Each drive started out with just an explanation about the project, encouraging people to take or leave whatever files they chose. He also posted instructions on how to install their own dead drops on his website. The rest was up to the public, and they took to it avidly.
During the golden age of spying, the dead drop was an invaluable tool: a letter, picture or microfilm would be deposited in a secret hiding place — often a hollow rock, or false bit of brick — for another spy to pick up. That way information could be passed between agents without them ever having to meet in person and endanger their secret identities. In the era of email encryption, and satellite communication, it is doubtful that a dead drop is still a part of a modern spy’s repertoire, but thanks to Bartholl today, there are more than 1,500 active drops across the globe, on every continent save Antarctica.
The project courted controversy after instructions for manufacturing methamphetamine, and schematics for making a bomb were found on drops in Europe
Each drop is catalogued in an online database, giving its date of installation, size and location coordinates. Imagine our excitement when we saw, ninth on the list and installed on March 6, Hong Kong’s very own dead drop, located on the first floor of the Ho Sin Hang Engineering Building at the Chinese University in Sha Tin. We went searching for it and were able to find it without too much trouble.
The Sha Tin drop is a bit different from the typical USB stick drops. It is an online dead drop: once you get in range you are able to join a small wi-fi network and get access to the drop. The site you see is pirate themed, with an explanation about how the project works, a chat area, an online forum and a place to upload and download files.
The project has courted controversy after instructions for how to manufacture methamphetamines, and schematics for making a bomb were found on drops in Europe. We were excited to see what kind of forbidden information Hongkongers were keen to share and, while there were certainly no bomb instructions, the contents were politically provocative: a photograph of the Lennon wall at the height of the Occupy Central protests, and a full length digital copy of Under the Dome, former TV presenter Chai Jing’s documentary about pollution in China, which was recently removed from Chinese video sites.
We uploaded a few surprises ourselves but to reveal them here would hardly be good spying.