The prevailing explanation is that Trump is showing respect to French President Emmanuel Macron by downplaying possible contact with Putin, so as not to distract from the elaborate French ceremonies for 40 million war dead.

But some experts believe unannounced talks may happen anyhow during Trump’s less than 48 hours in France.

“Russians do want to meet, but Trump — the president of chaos — wants to keep things interesting, for us to keep guessing, as he always does,” said Nina Khrushcheva, a New School international affairs expert and granddaughter of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

“All in all, it is Trump, the showman, who has Putin, the spy man, where he wants him, not the other way around,” she said.

A Trump-Putin meeting was first confirmed Oct. 23 during a visit to Moscow by national security adviser John Bolton, who said “President Trump would look forward to meeting” with Putin in France, sending reporters scrambling to cover the first in-person talks between the leaders since an explosive Helsinki meeting in July.

Last week, however, Bolton said “it’s likely to be brief,” before Trump said Monday he would “probably not” meet with Putin. On Wednesday, a Kremlin official told the press there would be a “short working lunch” with Trump, though Trump downplayed it, describing it as a multinational meal.

Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Alexander Vershbow, who served during Putin’s early years in power, from 2001 to 2005, said he “wouldn’t read too much into” scheduling turbulence, noting that Trump has expressed interest in speaking with Putin during the G-20 summit in Argentina later this year.

“While Bolton, when he was in Moscow, agreed to the meeting in Paris, scheduling it proved difficult because of Macron’s sensitivity about Trump and Putin diverting attention from the elaborate WWI events. Since the G-20 is just a few weeks away, Buenos Aires seems to be the more practical choice, and they will not have a formal sit-down in Paris,” Vershbow said.

Vershbow speculated that the “working lunch” could mean, from a Russian perspective, that Trump and Putin are scheduled to sit next to each other among a broader group of world leaders.

Alina Polyakova, a Russia expert at the Brookings Institution, said she also is hearing that the abandoned meeting is a nod to French hosts.

But Polyakova, who is in Paris for the gathering, suspects that Trump will still find a chance to speak with Putin there.

“Over the last weeks, the meeting has been downgraded from an official bilateral to now what sounds like an informal chat in the corridors or on the sidelines of the lunch with other leaders,” she said. “The message is: This is not a summit between Trump and Putin, it’s an international forum hosted by France. I have no doubt, however, that Putin and Trump want to meet and will find an opportunity to do so even if officially it’s a ‘nonmeeting.’”

On a Wednesday afternoon call with reporters, two senior Trump administration officials maintained that there are no plans for Trump and Putin to meet.

“We do not plan a separate bilateral meeting with President Putin,” one senior official said.

“The lunch is a widely gathered lunch with leaders attending the event. There’s nothing that’s right now planned or expected to be planned, any kind of pull asides or exchanges [with Putin],” the other senior official said.

The political stakes of Trump interactions with Putin are high, and in the opinion of his critics, he’s made a number of missteps, most notably at the Helsinki summit in July, where Trump appeared to accept Putin’s denial of 2016 election meddling, contradicting the findings of U.S. spy agencies and federal prosecutors. Trump later said he misspoke.

In March, Trump called Putin to congratulate him on being re-elected, reportedly ignoring a note from advisers saying “DO NOT CONGRATULATE.” In a pre-Helsinki leak that may have been aimed to mitigate the impression Trump was soft on Putin, someone told reporter Jonathan Swan of Axios that Trump got aggressive with Putin during that congratulatory call, objecting to a Russian government video depicting nuclear missiles striking Florida.

During a press conference at the White House on Wednesday, Trump ignored a reporter’s twice-asked question about whether Putin had called to congratulate him on the Tuesday midterm election results, in which Republicans gained Senate seats but lost the House of Representatives.

As Trump prepares to arrive in France on Friday, some Russia experts aren’t sure what to make of the uncertainty around possible interaction with Putin.

Michael McFaul, a frequent Trump critic who served as U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014, said, “Honestly, I have no idea why we are getting such mixed signals.”