Russian President Vladimir Putin has spent much of his marathon talks with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron on the Ukraine crisis laying out claims dating back to the end of the Cold War, Reuters reported, citing sources in the French leader's inner circle.

Sources said Macron was struck by how different Putin was from the man he met at his summer residence on the French Riviera three years ago.

"Putin gave him five hours of historical revisionism," said one of the two sources, describing how the Kremlin leader laid out his belief that the West had broken commitments to Russia since 1997 with the enlargement of NATO to include former Soviet bloc states.

"So he goes on for hours rewriting history from 1997 on. He drowns you in these long monologues. And the president (Macron) kept on going back to the issues of the day," said the source.

The meeting with Macron was a rare opportunity for a Western leader to spend extended time in Putin's company and assess his state of mind.

During the talks, the French leader was alone with Putin, without aides and with only one interpreter.

According to the first French source, Putin has repeatedly returned to the issue of the 1997 agreement with NATO, which paved the way for three former Soviet bloc countries - Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic - to join the alliance during talks.

Sources say Putin called the agreement a betrayal of previous promises by the alliance not to expand. NATO members deny ever having made such promises.

Putin also referred to the Maidan revolution of 2014. "He says it was a coup and that Zelenskiy is controlled by the United States," the first source said.

According to a second source, Macron told his team after the talks that when he hosted Putin in France in 2019, the Kremlin leader seemed  "less tough and less focused on history" than this time round, according to a second source.