Certainly those present were jubilant. President Putin's address was interrupted by standing ovations. He made much of Crimea's special meaning for Russia, arguing not only that the Crimean people had the right to determine their own fate, but that he was correcting a "historical wrong", because when Crimea ended up in independent Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia, as he put it, "felt it had been robbed".
Other parts of the address were troubling: Russia and Ukraine he said were not just neighbours but one nation, and Moscow would always protect the millions of Russian speakers there. And he still sees the new authorities in Kiev as an illegitimate puppet government under the control of radicals.
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