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Frank Snepp, a former top CIA analyst, now a Peabody-Award winning journalist, specializes in national security issues. His CIA memoir, Decent Interval, triggered a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

Yesterday, in Part One of this essay, I explored how Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen, while top advisers to Donald Trump, conceived two backdoor takeover schemes for Ukraine, ready-made for Vladimir Putin, that have come back to haunt. These plans envision a Russia-controlled enclave in eastern Ukraine which bears an eerie similarity to what Putin is now trying to establish militarily. The hidden inspiration behind Manafort’s scenario was a shadowy business associate, Konstantin Kilimnik, identified by U.S. intelligence authorities as a well-placed Russian spy.   

Now in Part Two, I examine what happened to these backdoor gambits, their current relevance, and how Trump, having failed to make them work initially, tried to compensate Putin by weakening Ukraine’s military defenses.  

Was Trump…