'Trump may have gone to the toilet with Putin at G20', jokes Russian foreign minister Lavrov

Donald Trump may have held more meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G20 summit than has been disclosed, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Friday (21 July).

The relationship between the US president and Putin is under intense scrutiny amid mounting allegations of Russian intervention in the presidential election.

The two world leaders met for the first time at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, last month.

They shared a highly anticipated handshake before holding a private formal two-hour bilateral meeting in which Trump later said Putin denied all allegations that he ordered Russian officials to interfere in the US election.

It was later revealed that Putin and Trump held a second, previously undisclosed, meeting during a dinner attended by all the G20 leaders and their spouses.

"They might have met even much more than just three times," Lavrov told NBC News in an exclusive interview.

"Maybe they went to the toilet together, that was a fourth time," he joked.

When asked if the leaders held any other conversations during the summit or met each other in the corridor, Lavrov used the analogy of children at a kindergarten.

"When you are bought by your parents to a kindergarten do you mix with the people who are waiting in the same room to start going to a classroom?" he asked.

"I remember when I was in that position I did spend five or ten minutes in the kindergarten before they brought us to the classroom," he added.

Responding to claims that Trump spent almost an hour speaking to Putin at the G20 dinner, Lavrov said that he was not there, but had heard Trump spoke to him as he "went to pick up his wife", who was sat next to the Russian leader.

"[He] spent some minutes with President Putin... So what?" he asked.