In response, Trump leant on his favorite crutch: Twitter. “Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin is ‘sick.’ All G 20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany. Press knew!” he wrote. “The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest! Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!”

“U.S. allies were surprised, flummoxed, disheartened.”

For foreign policy experts, the officially undocumented conversation is, in fact, disquieting. A simple exchange of pleasantries between two leaders, whose relationship is under investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller and two congressional committees, would require strident self-control, especially given the tangled, geopolitical issues at stake. That Trump avoided discussing tensions over Syria, strategy about North Korea, and alleged Russian meddling in his election campaign, feels unlikely, even if there was a meal, and a concert-worth of music to dissect. Just how acute those tensions remain emerged Tuesday, shortly before the report of the dinner conversation emerged, when the Kremlin intensified its demands that the Trump administration return two U.S.-based compounds that the Obama administration confiscated from Russia last year in retaliation for said meddling.

The Trump administration can persevere with their tactic that the storm surrounding Russia is simply a “witch hunt,” but as the evidence mounts, their claims that each incident is isolated, and unimportant, look flimsy. Aboard Air Force One on the way home from Hamburg, Trump’s top aides helped him draft a statement about the meeting his son Donald Trump Jr. attended last year with a Kremlin-connected lawyer, whom he was told would provide damaging information on Hillary Clinton as part of Russia’s efforts to help elect his father. Yesterday, as Trump’s conversation with Putin made headlines, so did the name of the eighth, previously unrevealed person in attendance: Irakly Kaveladze, an associate of the Kremlin-connected developer Aras Agalarov, the man behind the meeting, who initially connected with Trump when his Miss Universe pageant was held in Moscow in 2013. (Kaveladze was also believed by federal investigators to have been involved in a massive, billion dollar money laundering scheme to move Russian and Eastern European money through U.S. banks, an accusation Kaveladze has dismissed, fittingly, as a “witch hunt.”) Kaveladze, who says he was only present to “serve as an interpreter if necessary,” has been contacted by Mueller’s team and agreed to be interviewed by F.B.I. investigators, according to his lawyer.

The latest revelations of previously undisclosed Trumpworld meetings with Russians—at Trump Tower last year, and in Hamburg this month—fit a labyrinthine pattern of circumventing traditional U.S. institutions in their attempts to establish working relations with Moscow. In May, The Washington Post reported that Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner (also present at the already-infamous meeting, and under fire for failing to disclose multiple meetings with foreign associates) had tried to set up a secret backchannel between the Trump team and the Kremlin using secure Russian diplomatic facilities, far from the prying eyes of U.S. intelligence. Even without that line of communication, some sort of network seems to have existed: whether it was strategically built, or the clumsy work of a neophytic administration will be down to Robert Mueller to decide.

Whether or not the Trump-Putin meeting was “sinister,” news of the two leaders’ amiable conversation is doing little to soothe fears that the American president is being played. “I’ve never in my life seen a relationship between two major countries where the interests are so misaligned while the leaders are so buddy-buddy. It doesn’t add up,” said Bremmer. “Trump has been inconsistent on his China policy, he’s been inconsistent on his NATO policy. On any foreign policy issue he’s been on both sides. Except Russia. It doesn’t make sense. The fact he was willing to do this in front of global leaders shows he just doesn’t care how America is perceived.”

Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that the G20 meeting took place in Hamburg, not Munich.