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.

Mr. Putin didn’t directly mention the war, saying only that he “was sincerely interested” in halting “what is happening” because Russians and Ukrainians “have the same roots” and “for us this is a tragedy and a great pain.” Casting Russia as the victim of the war it itself started has been a staple of Kremlin propaganda ever since Mr. Putin announced his invasion — described as a “special military operation” to save Russia — in 2022.

“Putin and Russia are revisionist; they cannot accept having lost the Cold War,” said Laurynas Kasciunas, the former defense minister of Lithuania, which until 1991 was part of the Soviet Union and has since joined NATO. Also now in NATO are Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania and other former members of Moscow’s now-defunct military alliance, the Warsaw Pact.