You want to influence a country and it's government so you invade their economic heart and try to forcefully tell it's soldiers to bow down. You set up camp with unmarked soldiers at that.
Yeah, it's leverage with what tools he has at his disposal. The EU/US used soft power to get what they wanted and now Russia is using hard power. Classic geopolitics on both sides.
- Crimea isn't the economic heart of Ukraine, E.Ukraine is.
- Russia signed an agreement with Ukraine that gave them the right to intervene in times of crisis if Ukraine or Crimea requested it, Crimea sent that request. Plus, and invasion would mean troops came from Russia. The Crimea situation is almost all troops that were already stations there, the few that were flown in was also legal under the agreement I alluded to.
- Telling the soldiers to surrender is in order to guarantee that order won't be lost like other parts of the country, again a request of the Crimean govt.
- Putin is using this to emphasize that although the protesters from Midon were in their right mind to get rid of Yanukovych, the process in which it was done was wrong and didn't consider the huge population that voted for Yanukovych in the first place. By pointing this out, it makes the new govt have to be more honest.....a new govt that, and I can't stress this enough, has neo-Nazi elements within it and more or less have corrupt characters amongst the good ones. Ukraine's relationship with Russia is extremely important moving forward, and vice versa.