Nuland helped to overthrow the elected government of Ukraine in 2014. The plan was to make it militarily strong to challenge Russia. The only glitch was that the plans for the US naval base in Crimea (to challenge the Russian naval base at Sevastopol, Crimea) was circumvented by the quick actions of Crimea to declare independence from Ukraine (in a matter of a week) and vote to join with Russia less than 2 weeks after the coup.
They were planning to have lots of time to build up weapons and considered the current inventory sufficient. The west’s evaluation of Russia was that they were not very capable militarily, that their economy would collapse under punitive sanctions, and that the CIA/NATO-trained Ukrainian militias were sufficient to not only hold Ukraine, but perhaps push well into Russia proper….in which case Vladimir Putin would be overthrown by our USAID-backed opposition with the help of USAID-funded media in eastern Europe.
It was a matter of lots of wrong information, wrong evaluations, and lack of any real plan.
