Yeah... though the NyTimes is hardly a good source of info in regards to this event or Putin. I didn't see any coverage that they made on the event that left me thinking they actually understand what's happening. I suggest spiegel.de, reuters, bbc, deutschewelle or even cnn to some degree.
As to Putin... while he does use the Church in Russia to gain political support, he isn't particularly religious. You don't see him invoking God or Christianity in his political statements, at least not nearly as much as, say, american politicians do. He just defends Church interests and in return, the Church supports him, or whoever is in power.
He may be a bit out of touch with reality, but he is still in touch enough to understand how far he can push. And Crimea is an easy push because Ukraine is a push-over. And I am fairly distressed... and angry and discouraged over the recent events, but I don't think Putin is a madman. I don't make that mistake.
Fallen made a good argument some time ago and I will reinvoke it. He said that Putin is trying to make a new "glue" for Russia to bind the country and the people together. And I understand what he says by that. After nearly a century of communism and a tremedous loss in both prestige... and some troubles early on with Chechnya, there are identity problems as to what it means to be Russian and what the country should be going for. So he's doing what he can do to create that new glue, that new identity to bind people together.
But as I also said... even if Russian identity is now a bit "shaky" it's still a lot more identifiable than to what being "ukrainian" means... because Ukrainians have been under the tsarist boot for centuries than under communism which was quite brutal... and even after 1989 they were basically a sattelite...
I don't know if I can fully express what this is, in all it's complexity, without filling a wall text. It's a common problem in Eastern Europe. Communism tried to create the "new man", a new human being that is void of greed or anything that is considered " capitalist desires" and the re-education programs were inhumane, because the "new man" that communism tried to create was actually, not human at all. So you have half of Europe under half a century of communism and Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and other nations under communism for almost a century. It's hard to imagine this if you're say, an american. The identity of "american" and what it means was NEVER under attack by external forces. It was never repressed by someone else and tried to be replaced with whatever suited that more powerful entity. Whatever changes happened in what "american" is, happened because americans decided that.