Sitting in a stuffy, overpacked hall at the Presidential Palace, in Helsinki, watching Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump give a joint press conference after their meeting today, I was shocked but not surprised. Not surprised because it has been clear for some time that, at a minimum, Trump has a kind of autocrat’s envy for Putin, who is the strongman that Trump likes to play on television, and, at a maximum, may feel beholden to him or the Russian state and those close to it.

As my colleague Susan B. Glasser reported last month, Trump has personally been pushing for today’s meeting for some time. Putin was only too happy to oblige: such a one-on-one meeting offered the chance to be seen as a global statesman, an equal with the President of the United States, the leader of a country whose participation was needed to solve just about every pressing world problem. All Trump wanted was the attention and the photo op, it seemed, à la Singapore; all Putin wanted was the mirror of that symbolism, not to make any real deals, let alone concessions. And so it’s no surprise that the Putin-Trump summit indeed delivered exactly that: a content-light meeting that gave Trump his pictures and momentary id massage, and allowed Putin to keep in place a rather advantageous status quo, gaining recognition and status for himself and Russia in exchange for, well, essentially nothing.

Nonetheless, I was shocked watching Trump repeatedly veer into riffs and tangents, answering questions about what U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies have to say about Russia’s interference by talking about Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, the D.N.C. servers, Peter Strzok, and, ultimately, the unreliability of U.S. officials and agencies. I’m not sure that even Putin expected Trump to say that he found his denials “strong and powerful.” That an American President would side with a Russian one over his own intelligence community is shocking—but, with Trump, not surprising. Putin must be flying back to Moscow content, not because he did anything so skillful or brilliant in Helsinki but because he was simply smart enough to sit back and pocket one good hand after another. “Yes, I did,” Putin said, when asked if he wanted Trump to win. Smart bet.