Rhetorically, it is brilliant, even if moralistic posturing by a crypto-fascist like Putin is ludicrous.  (Moralistic posturing by the leader of the United States, the most dangerous country on the face of the earth, is also ludicrous, for somewhat different reasons.)  But he is right that it would be prudent for everyone, even the aggressors, not to launch criminal wars of aggression.  

Let us be realistic:  Russia and America have always done what they can get away with in the regions where they thought they could act without provoking the other:  thus we had the American invasion of South Vietnam in 1962, and of Iraq in 2003, among many other cases.  So, too, Russia dealt with Hungary, Afghanistan and Chechnya in a similarly brutal manner.  But 2013 is not 2003, and Russia has already seen one Baathist party toppled in the Middle East.  Putin has made clear that it will not see a second one meet the same fate.   The nominal stabilitiy of the so-called "world order" since WWII–i.e., the absence of catastrophic wars of annihilation involving many countries and continents–has depended on this restraint.  Putin's movtives are no doubt as impure and mixed as Obama's, but one may hope, for the sake of that part of humanity not within Assad's reach (and no doubt for many of those subject to his criminality), that they will hear each other clearly.