From what I gather Obama made a deal with Saudi Arabia, if Russia invades, we release strategic oil reserves and Saudi Arabia lowers the price of gas drastically, this would crash the Russian economy (McCain is right on this, Russia is basically a gas station). It seems that Putin took the threat seriously, though he is by no means done. The Saudi end in this is that they will be selling our anti-aircraft weapons to the Jihadist rebels in Syria.
If this is true, then this is the first real Presidential action Obama has done while in office, almost certainly not his idea. Still, one day we will pay for selling advanced weaponry to Islamist cutthroats.
The arms US sends to Saudis wind up in the hands of jihadis regardless.
However, I think that the real threat to Putin came from Merkel, not from Obama nor the Saudis. If she just flat-out said that she's willing to cut out Russian Natural Gas and instead have Germans pay an arm and a leg for imported natural gas, there isn't much Putin can do about it. While Russia is a big oil exporter, gas is its most significant export in terms of market share.
“Saudi Arabia lowers the price of gas drastically”
Are you speaking of gasoline or natural gas? Saudi exports large quantities of neither. They have modest refinery capacity. Saudi does have large reserves of natural gas, but limited capacity to retrieve it at present. Most of what they do produce goes to internal consumption. Their big export remains oil. Oil they could dump into the market...
Interesting articles and graphs:
http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=10231
http://www.eia.gov/countries/cab.cfm?fips=SA