In a speech to a joint session of parliament, which he used to call for the "reunification" of Crimea with Russia, he said that region has a special role in Russian history that makes it unique.
Ecstatic leaders of the Russian and Crimean parliaments signed a treaty of accession as soon as Putin was done, and the Kremlin said afterwards it considers the treaty to be in force even before parliament has ratified it.
Sevastopol, the city where Russia's Black Sea naval fleet is based, also entered the Russian Federation, as a separate entity.
Even while declaring that Moscow will not seek to expand its holdings in Ukraine, Putin also promised that Russia will do what it must to protect the rights of Russians living abroad -- which suggests that he intends to play a role in restive eastern Ukraine, with its large Russian population.
He said Moscow will always protect the rights of Russians using "political, diplomatic and legal means."
But he stressed: "Don't believe those who say Russia will take other regions after Crimea. We don't need that."
The speech touched off dancing and jubilant cheers in downtown Sevastopol, even as the United States continued diplomatic consultations it says are aimed at reversing Russia's takeover of Crimea from Ukraine.
Vice President Joe Biden landed in Warsaw on Tuesday morning, where he will confer with Polish and Estonian leaders over the situation. In the evening he intends to fly onward to Lithuania for similar meetings.
One senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the vice president's plans, said his trip is "first and foremost to reassure our allies that we are deeply concerned about Russia's action in Ukraine and what the deeper implications might be."
The adviser said Biden will discuss measures that would be taken "in the days and weeks ahead," building on financial sanctions imposed on 11 Russian and Ukrainian officials that President Obama announced Monday but that appeared to have little effect on Putin's calculations.
In Kiev, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk gave a nationally televised address on Tuesday in which - pointedly using the Russian language - he seemed to recognize the limits of the situation. He pledged Ukraine would not join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and sought to reassure ethnic Russians and the government in Moscow.
Putin's 50-minute speech was a catalog of 20 years of Russian complaints about the West. He touched on the downfall of the Soviet Union, Kosovo, NATO expansion, missile defense, Libya, Iraq and Syria. He mentioned Soviet support for the reunification of Germany in 1990. "I hope Germans will support the aspirations of Russians to restore Russia," he said.
"Our Western partners have crossed a line," he said. "They've been unprofessional."
He said the challenge presented to Russia by the Ukrainian crisis couldn't be ducked.
"We have to admit one thing -- Russia is an active participant in international affairs," he said. "At these critical times we see the maturity of nations, the strength of nations."
The speech comes as a defiant Russia shows no sign of bending to American or European pressure over the Crimea crisis, which has turned into the sharpest confrontation between Moscow and the West since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
Putin traced Russian roots in Crimea to the baptism there of Vladimir, who converted the Russian people to Christianity just over 1,000 years ago. He mentioned that the bones of Soviet soldiers who fought the Germans in World War II are buried all across the peninsula.
"All these places are sacred to us," he said. After noting that Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev assigned Crimea to Ukraine in 1954, he argued that Russia by rights should have gotten it back in 1991 when the Soviet Union dissolved.
"Russia was not just robbed -- it was robbed in broad daylight," he said.
In his historical remarks, he also touched on Russians' roots in Ukraine, in a way that a large number of Ukrainians may not have found to be reassuring. "We sympathize with the people of Ukraine," he said. "We're one nation. Kiev is the mother of all Russian cities."
He described Kiev as a city today where a legitimate protest was overtaken by those plotting a coup, backed by "Western sponsors," and where government ministers can't act without first getting permission "from the gunmen on the Maidan" -- a reference to Independence Square. "We have no one to negotiate with," he said.
Putin insisted that Russia was acting within international law. He dwelt at some length on Kosovo, which broke free of Serbia in 1999, after NATO intervention, and ultimately declared independence, with international recognition, in 2008.
He said that precedent gives Western countries no standing to complain about Crimea.
"You can't call something black one day, and the same thing white the next," he said.
He complained that leaders in the West, led by Americans, "believe they've been entrusted by God to decide the fate of other people."
His address, devoted to proving that Russia can't be pushed around, was met with a standing ovation -- which is much less common here than in the U.S. Congress.
In Sevastopol several thousand people had flocked to the central square to watch Putin speak on a giant TV screen. They applauded loudly several times as he spoke -- when he said it would have been a betrayal to deny the Crimeans when they asked Russian troops to come protect them.
After Putin finished speaking and a treaty was signed, the crowd started dancing in the square and singing the Russian national anthem.
"We did it. We did it. We truly did it," exclaimed Svetlana Kalinina, 53, as tears rolled down her cheeks from behind her sunglasses.
Another woman who said her first name was Natasha kept repeating "Thank you Putin."
"I have waited so long for this," she said, "We were given away, like a sack of potatoes. And finally we are coming back home."
© Unknown
If played right, he doesn't need designs, just enough patience that will allow the military of Ukraine to reestablish order... with perhaps 'a little help from their friends'.