President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia got what he wanted most from his meeting with President Trump: American affirmation of his status as a global power.
HELSINKI, Finland — President Vladimir V. Putin did not get President Trump to endorse his seizure of Crimea, lift sanctions, halt a new arms race that Moscow can ill afford or cut a deal on any of the other issues that have so poisoned relations between Russia and the United States.
But Mr. Putin did get what he needed most from the meeting in Helsinki: a statement by President Trump that, whatever America’s intelligence community might say about meddling by Moscow in the 2016 election — and whatever the damage caused by Russian actions in Ukraine — Mr. Putin is welcome back in the club of global world leaders.
While Mr. Putin seems to have secured no major concessions from Mr. Trump, state-controlled Russian news agencies, quoting the foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, declared their meeting was “better than super” and “fabulous.”
The host on Rossiya 24, a state-owned news channel that echoes the Kremlin’s take on events, declared that “in the circumstances just having a good talk is itself a big deal.” Both presidents, the host said, “demonstrated a willingness to come to terms.”
By turns somber and jocular, Mr. Putin commanded a news conference the two leaders held, with his mastery of policy details and theatrical flair — and by getting Mr. Trump to take his denials that Russia meddled in the 2016 election more seriously than the conclusion of United States intelligence agencies that it did.
Mr. Trump cut a less imposing figure, leaving Mr. Putin to explain American policy on Crimea, and nodding while the Russian president scoffed at accusations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow as “utter nonsense.”
Mr. Putin even brought along a soccer ball, tossing it to Mr. Trump after being praised for Russia’s success as host of the World Cup. “The ball is now in your court,” Mr. Putin said.
When a journalist asked whether Russia had compromising material on Mr. Trump — a reference to reports that he was caught on video with prostitutes during a 2013 visit to Moscow — the Russian president started giggling before insisting that Mr. Trump was one of hundreds of businessmen who have visited Russia, and that he did not know at the time that Mr. Trump was in Moscow.
Mr. Trump declared to the journalists that before he met Mr. Putin Monday in the Hall of Mirrors at Finland’s presidential palace, the relationship between Moscow and Washington had “never been worse.”
“That changed as of about four hours ago,” Mr. Trump said. “I really believe that.”
Many don’t believe it, however, just as many doubted Mr. Trump’s claim after his meeting in May with the dictator of North Korea that he had solved the Korean nuclear crisis.
For Mr. Putin, frustrated for months by Mr. Trump’s failure to deliver on his repeated promises to “get along with Russia,” the first formal meeting between the two leaders returned Russia to what Mr. Putin views as its indispensable and undeniable role as one of two big powers responsible for settling the world’s affairs.
“To get again on an equal footing with the American president as a respected equal has been one of the prime strategic goals of Putin, and he’s started to achieve this major goal,” said Norbert Röttgen, the chairman of the foreign policy committee of the German Parliament, the Bundestag.
But Mr. Röttgen added that despite European fears, Mr. Putin did not wring out concessions that would hurt America’s Western allies. Many Europeans will be glad that Washington and Moscow “have started to talk again, and this is a good thing on issues like nuclear nonproliferation, Syria and the security of Israel,” he said.
Jeremy Shapiro, a former American diplomat now with the European Council on Foreign Relations, said that European allies would be relieved that Mr. Trump did not announce the cancellation of military exercises, as he did after his meeting in May with Kim Jong-un, or make other dramatic concessions.
But the allies, Mr. Shapiro said, “will note that this U. S. president is much more interested in domestic politics than geopolitics or anything to do with Europe.”
Mr. Trump, he said, wants to ensure that accusations about Russia do not taint his election victory.
“He doesn’t worry about getting too close to Russia now, his base won’t mind and his people won’t resign,” he said.
Mr. Putin, a proud and prickly patriot, has long been aggrieved by Russia’s expulsion from the Group of 7 industrialized democracies after its annexation of Crimea in 2014, by the imposition of sanctions and by its relegation by President Obama to the status of a “regional power.”
Unveiling what he described as new “invincible” weapons in a state of the nation address in Moscow in March, Mr. Putin complained bitterly that “nobody really wanted to talk to us.” He added: “Listen now!”
The meeting in Helsinki has, if nothing else, shown that the United States is listening, and even ready to give Moscow a pass on Crimea; on the shooting down of MH17, a passenger aircraft traveling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, over eastern Ukraine in July 2014; and on its election meddling.
“This is Putin’s fourth U. S. president and this is the summit he has dreamed of for 18 years,” said Alina Polyakova of the Brookings Institution. “He finally got to present himself as this global statesman floating above petty politics and present himself and Russia as this great mediator for peace and humanitarian aid.”
Mr. Trump dodged a question about whether he trusted Mr. Putin’s denials of any meddling more than the assessment of his own intelligence agencies that Russia did interfere, but still said, “I don’t see any reason why it would.”
Like Mr. Trump, who before the meeting said he had “low expectations,” the Kremlin had also downplayed the prospect of a startling breakthrough in relations.
This left Russia’s political elite to start cheering the outcome of the meeting before it even ended and rejoice that Mr. Trump, by just meeting Mr. Putin as an equal, had recognized Russia as a global power, not a regional one.
“It is funny to recall the nonsense of Obama and his ilk about Russia as a weak ‘regional power,’ ” Aleksei K. Pushkov, a member of Russia’s upper house of Parliament and former head of the lower house’s foreign affairs committee, said in a tweet Monday afternoon while the presidents were still talking.
“Today, the world’s attention is drawn to Helsinki, and it is crystal clear to all that Russia and the U. S. are deciding the fate of the world, that the leaders of the planet’s leading powers are meeting,” he said in the tweet.
On Ukraine — the foreign policy issue that has most divided Washington and Moscow — Mr. Trump let Mr. Putin do all the talking.
