NYT: After the Alaska summit, Putin said the war’s ‘root causes’ lie in Russia’s lost Cold War status, not Ukraine.
He avoided calling it a war, referred to ‘the situation around Ukraine,’ and demanded a new European ‘security balance’ to restore Moscow’s global power. 1/
Putin linked today’s fighting to grievances first voiced in Munich 2007 and again in 2022: NATO expansion, loss of Moscow’s hegemony, and a world where Russia no longer sets the rules. 2/
This narrative casts Ukraine as a pawn in a Western plot. By refusing to name the war, Putin implies the real struggle is not territory, but Russia’s status against NATO and the US. 3/
Lavrov wore a ‘USSR’ sweatshirt in Alaska to underline Kremlin nostalgia.
Russian media praised Trump’s warm welcome of Putin and his remark that ‘Russia is No. 2 in the world’ as proof Moscow had regained great-power standing. 4/
Russian nationalist elites echoed the same theme. Senator Klishas said the summit confirmed Russia’s right to pursue its “special operation” while demanding a new European security architecture. 5/
Putin’s goal remains to rewrite the post-1991 order: push NATO out of Eastern Europe, bar Ukraine from membership, and regain recognition as a global equal alongside the US, like at Yalta in 1945. 6X
Source: nytimes.com/2025/08/17/wor…
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