Financial TimesVladimir Putin came out on Tuesday with a classic performance: clever, tough, sardonic and deeply cynical.In an hour-long press conference at his Novo-Ogaryovo residence, Russia’s president took at least one step back from confrontation. Possibly he blinked in the face of threatened western sanctions over Russia’s creeping occupation of the Black Sea peninsula, or Monday’s 11 per cent fall in the Moscow stock market. More likely, after the slickly executed Crimea operation, and the far more serious threat to send Russia’s army into eastern Ukraine, he felt he had made his point – for now.There was, he said, “no need” for Russian military force in Ukraine, which would happen only in an “extreme case” – though Russia still had the option. Crucially, he said, the need for actual use of force in Crimea had “dissipated”. And, he added: “I believe that it will not be necessary for us to do anything like that in eastern Ukraine.”Mr Putin also said Russia did not plan to annex Crimea. Many in the west will be reluctant to take such claims at face value, when Mr Putin also claimed, straining credibility, that armed men surrounding Ukrainian military sites in Crimea were “not Russian soldiers”, but members of a local volunteer force.There were potentially worrying signals, too. Mr Putin warned Russia might not recognise the results of Ukraine’s presidential election, called for May 25, as the polls were unlikely to be fair.What about the Budapest Memorandum, signed in 1994 when Kiev gave up its nuclear arsenal, which bound Russia, the US and the UK to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity? Mr Putin suggested, slightly ominously, that after Ukraine’s latest revolution, a “new state” might arise within its borders – and Russia had not signed the Budapest agreement with that state.Self-assured as ever, and showing less sign of strain over recent events than some western counterparts, Mr Putin had his own narrative.Ukraine, he said, had witnessed an “unconstitutional seizure of power” by western-backed extremists, some of them wearing “armbands with swastikas”.What had happened in Kiev was another dangerous US attempt at social engineering, he jabbed. “They sit there across the pond . . . sometimes it seems they feel like they’re in a lab and they’re running all sorts of experiments on the rats without understanding the consequences of what they’re doing.”Yet perhaps the clearest message from Mr Putin’s press conference was his contempt for Viktor Yanukovich – hours after Russia’s ambassador to the UN cited a letter from the ousted president requesting Moscow to use force in Ukraine as a justification for its actions in Crimea.Mr Putin had told his Ukrainian counterpart he had “no chance of being re-elected”. Mr Yanukovich had no political future, Mr Putin added. Did he sympathise with him?“A person who is head of state has certain rights and certain duties. The first duty is to implement the will of the people who elected him . . . You have to analyse if he did that.”One mooted scenario in recent days had been that Russia might invade eastern Ukraine and install a puppet government in Kharkiv, the east’s biggest city, under Mr Yanukovich. While plenty of other scenarios remain possible, that one, at least, seems dead.