En route to Buenos Aires on Thursday, Donald Trump had a change of heart. Less than an hour earlier, as he walked across the White House lawn, the president had told reporters that he was looking forward to meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the annual G20 summit. “I probably will be meeting with President Putin,” he said. He had considered canceling the meeting—on Sunday, Russian forces fired at and seized three Ukrainian naval vessels—but decided to press ahead. “They’d like to have it,” he explained. “I think it’s a very good time to have the meeting.” The West Wing appeared to be on the same page. A senior administration official emphasized the importance of maintaining a “high-level dialogue” to address the Ukraine situation on Wednesday night. The Kremlin confirmed earlier Thursday that the Trump-Putin sit-down was on for around noon on Saturday at the Park Hyatt.

As Air Force One was preparing to leave Washington, however, Michael Cohen, Trump’s former attorney, dropped a bombshell. Standing in a New York City courtroom on Thursday morning, Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about his negotiations with Russian officials to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Cohen previously told lawmakers that those conversations ended in January 2016 because of “business reasons.” In fact, Cohen admitted, he continued to pursue business in Russia as late as June 2016—well into Trump’s presidential campaign. (Trump responded to the news by calling Cohen a “weak person.”)

Shortly afterward, Trump canceled the meeting with Putin. The official reason, provided in a pair of tweets sent from 30,000 feet, cited Russia’s failure to return Ukraine’s ships and sailors. “I look forward to a meaningful Summit again as soon as this situation is resolved,” he concluded. Aboard Air Force One, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters that the decision was made after Trump consulted with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Adviser John Bolton and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly.

But the timing of the president’s decision raised eyebrows. Nothing involving the Russia-Ukraine standoff had changed, after all, between the time Trump left the White House and when he logged back on to Twitter. Indeed, the senior administration official previously indicated to me that the very point of the meeting was, in part, to address the Ukraine issue.

While the White House points the finger at Moscow, Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney in the Russia investigation, is blaming Robert Mueller. “It is hardly coincidental that the special counsel once again files a charge just as the president is leaving for a meeting with world leaders,” he said Thursday. “[He] did the very same thing as the president was leaving for a world summit in Helsinki,” he added, referring to the timing of Mueller’s last blockbuster indictment, when the special counsel charged 12 Russians just three days before Trump and Putin were scheduled to meeting in Finland this past July.

Democrats offered a somewhat different spin. As incoming House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff said in a statement, the developments raise the question of “whether the Russians sought financial leverage over Trump and his associates, or hold any such leverage today.” The optics, in other words, would have been bad.

Another one-on-one meeting with Putin may have been a mistake anyway. Following the skirmish in the Black Sea over the weekend, former State Department officials told me they had serious concerns that Trump might reprise his conciliatory performance in Helsinki. Nicholas Burns, the former ambassador to NATO, told me earlier this week that if Trump were “to seek to mollify Putin, I think it would be disadvantageous for the U.S. to have the meeting, because it would make our president once again look weak and submissive compared to Putin,” as he did before. “I think the White House has an important decision to make here . . . It is not at all certain that the president knows the facts, but is also willing to be tough-minded. He is not a normal president.”