On Friday afternoon, after Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky was asked to leave the White House following a disastrous Oval Office confrontation with Donald Trump and his retinue, I called a source close to the Kremlin to see how the televised meeting went over in Moscow. Imagine my surprise when this source picked up the phone while sitting in an Amtrak bound from Washington to New York. He’d had some meetings in the capital, he said, including with people close to the Trump administration. “I’m just someone who knows people,” he demurred when I asked him whom he’d met. (I should note here that this source does not actually work for the Russian government, is not under sanctions, and has been traveling to the West freely and regularly for the past three years.)