http://archive.today/2025.08.17-040434/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/17/world/europe/russia-ukraine-putin-alaska.html

Putin Sees Ukraine Through a Lens of Grievance Over Lost Glory

Speaking after Friday’s summit, President Putin again implied that the war is all about Russia’s diminished status since the fall of the Soviet Union.

By Andrew Higgins

Andrew Higgins is a former Moscow bureau chief and now reports on Eastern Europe.

After all the pre-summit talk of land swaps and the technicalities of a possible cease-fire in Ukraine, President Vladimir V. Putin made clear after his meeting in Alaska with President Trump that his deepest concern is not an end to three and half years of bloodshed. Rather, it is with what he called the “situation around Ukraine,” code for his standard litany of grievances over Russia’s lost glory.

Returning to grudges he first aired angrily in 2007 at a security conference in Munich, and revived in February 2022 to announce and justify his full scale-invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Putin in his post-summit remarks in Alaska demanded that “a fair balance in the security sphere in Europe and the world as whole must be restored.”

Only this, he said, would remove “the root causes of the crisis” in Ukraine — Kremlin shorthand for Russia’s diminished status since it lost the Cold War with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the end of Moscow’s hegemony over Eastern Europe.

Shortly before attacking Ukraine in 2022, Russia presented NATO and the United States with draft treaties demanding that NATO retreat from Eastern Europe and bar Ukraine from ever entering the alliance. These demands, which would reverse Russia’s Cold War defeat, were swiftly dismissed.

But just before Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump met on Friday, Poland gave Moscow a pointed reminder that the old order is gone by holding a parade of tanks and other military hardware, much of it American-made, along the Vistula River in Warsaw. The display of military might, which also included a flyover of warplanes and helicopters, celebrated Polish victory over the Red Army in 1920 and showcased what is now the biggest military in the European Union.

Mr. Putin, in a television address in 2022 announcing the invasion, focused not on Ukraine but on complaints about what he described as Western bullying and disregard for legitimate Russian interests and status.

“Over the past 30 years we have been patiently trying to come to an agreement with the leading NATO countries regarding the principles of equal and indivisible security in Europe,” he said. “In response to our proposals, we invariably faced either cynical deception and lies or attempts at pressure and blackmail, while the North Atlantic alliance continued to expand despite our protests and concerns.”

A central part of Mr. Putin’s push to reshape the post Cold War order has been his effort to weaken or destroy the trans-Atlantic relationship created after World War II and expanded since 1991 with the admission to NATO of formerly Communist nations in Eastern Europe.

On that score, the invasion of Ukraine has backfired, increasing NATO’s presence near Russia’s borders. Finland, which has an 830-mile border with Russia, in 2023 cast aside decades of military nonalignment to join the NATO alliance. Sweden also joined.

But Mr. Trump, who has blown hot and cold for months on supporting Ukraine, sowed discord in the alliance in Alaska by seeming to adopt Mr. Putin’s plan to seek a sweeping peace agreement in Ukraine instead of securing the urgent cease-fire he said he wanted before the summit.

Andrew Higgins is the East and Central Europe bureau chief for The Times based in Warsaw. He covers a region that stretches from the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to Kosovo, Serbia and other parts of former Yugoslavia.