THE RARE DEBT DONALD ACTUALLY PAID:

On May 2, eight days before Lavrov showed up at the White House, Russian President Vladi­mir Putin was on the phone with Trump and made a request. ­Putin had "new ideas" about stopping the civil war carnage in Syria, according to a senior U.S. official, and noted that his top diplomat, Lavrov, would soon be visiting the United States for a previously scheduled meeting with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

"Will you see him?" Putin asked Trump, according to the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private talks.

"Yes," Trump replied.

Lavrov's itinerary had him going nowhere near Washington -- 4,100 miles away in Fairbanks, Alaska, where he and Tillerson would be attending a meeting of the Arctic Council, the group of countries that have territory in the Arctic region. Putin glossed over that detail with Trump, however, and once he agreed to a face-to-face meeting with Lavrov, the Russian minister changed his plans to jet first to Washington.

For the Kremlin, a private audience with the president was a major opportunity to show the world that U.S.-Russia relations were normalizing.

Since the crisis in Ukraine, when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and sent troops into breakaway eastern Ukraine, the United States has sought to show that it is not conducting "business as usual with Russian figures," said Andrew Weiss, a Russia specialist who is vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

But Putin and his deputies, Weiss said, have "sought whenever they could to lessen that international isolation and demonstrate, 'See, we're back in the family of nations, and we're all going to get back to business again.' "

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