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.

(Author’s Note: Just when you thought you were safe from Donald Trump, Putin’s Plan B blitzkrieg into eastern Ukraine is beginning to look like a “back door” takeover scheme once secretly promoted by Trump insiders and Russian operatives. On top of this, it was Trump who piqued Putin’s worst instincts in the first place, by encouraging him to believe our strategic partnerships are transactional and our aid commitments up for barter. Ukrainian patriots are now paying the price in blood.)

No one would ever accuse the murderous Vladimir Putin of going soft on Ukraine. But the recent shift of his military operations to Ukraine’s eastern borderlands, following his failed assault on Kyiv, represents a dramatic step away from his original go…