The current CIA director, William J Burns, actually recognized the eventual crackup of Ukraine back in 2008, when he served as U.S. ambassador to Russia. After Ukraine's NATO aspirations were announced at that year's Bucharest Security Conference, Burns wrote a secret cable (subsequently published by WikiLeaks) entitled, "Nyet Means Nyet: Russia's NATO Enlargement Redlines."

The missive to Washington contained a stern warning of trouble to come:

Ukraine and Georgia's NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia's influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests.

Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.

He got that right. For more than two decades, Washington's NATO expansion policy was a dagger aimed at the heart of an inherently divided Ukrainian polity – a division that had been suppressed by 69 years of brutal communist rule, but which broke into the open after the Soviet Union fell in 1991.

So as Burns predicted, in response to the 2014 putsch, Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the eastern Donbas region rose up against the coup government in Kiev, which they denounced as an illegitimate Western puppet regime, riddled with anti-Russian Neo-Nazis.