Stratfor is once again co-mingling their annoying habits of #1 looking at the right data/events with #2 analyzing them as though the Cold War was still on-going. But the world has changed. Former Soviets need no longer prop up Cuba and a variety of failed nation-states in its old empire, much less pay for maintaining armed forces capable of conquering European territory against an American enemy.
So Russia's worldview has changed (Stratfor simply hasn't adapted to the new times).
Likewise, Europe has changed. Germany has now united East and West into its old Greater Fatherland again. Yugoslavia is now Balkanized, and even Czechoslovakia has split up into smaller components. Thus, Europe's worldview has shifted dramatically since 1991. And again, Stratfor hasn't adjusted to this new reality.
Furthermore, the U.S. is no longer fighting Soviet aggression/expansion; instead, the U.S. is fighting a global war against Radical Islamics and a North Korean fanatic of a different sort. So the U.S. has changed its worldview since 1991, too.
Publicly, the leaked intel and various columnists' seem to be blaming the U.S. for the Ukrainian situation. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our CIA is wholly incompetent; pulling off such a stunt would require giving a thermo-nuclear causi belli to a large contingent of bureaucratic American gays and leftists who typically do little more than push paper and shout the same opinion at each other behind closed doors. Our CIA couldn't pull off such an operation, nor would it be entrusted with one. Moreover, it isn't in our prime interests to irritate the Ruskies.
Russia is fighting our same Radical-Islamic enemy in Chechnya as we are slaughtering wholesale in Iraq, Afghanistan, and in the Horn of Africa, among other places right now. For that matter, but not to digress on this point too much, so too is China fighting that same enemy in remote Xinjiang.
It's an enemy that Germany isn't really fighting, though. Germany is the odd man out, and that gives it unique status on a list of suspects behind Ukraine's current election woes.
With Ukraine split off from Russia, Germany is no longer held hostage by Russian energy contracts. Germany would gain a physical buffer of immense territory between the Bear and itself with Ukraine adapting a pro-Germany, anti-Russian stance, too.
The Ukraine offers unique launch facilities and nuclear expertise, too...something that Germany is prohibited from having. Germany is a nuclear unik, after all. She shoots blanks. But the Ukraine is under no such prohibition.
So while Germany (at least in public) wants to bring the Ukraine into NATO, the smart money says that what she is actually trying to do is bring the Ukraine into the new EU military axis...an axis that specifically excludes the U.S. and Russia.
Likewise, Germany could insure cheap, dependable energy imports while simultaneously building such a formidable military alliance with Ukraine.
So it is Germany, not the U.S., which stands to gain the most from a Ukrainian split away from Russia. It is likewise Germany that is not fighting the same common enemy as is the U.S. and Russia.
Nor is it Russia that is the emerging threat to world peace. Russian diplomats aren't criss-crossing the globe gathering political support against American actions.
So what Stratfor is missing is something entirely predictable by historical standards: a German powerplay for European status, run by a Beider Meinhoff "ex" terrorist (Fischer) and an avowed Nationalistic German Socialist (Schroeder).
Oh, and today's Germany is now violently anti-Jewish again, with an 11% unemployment rate and an entire generation of draft-age youth who don't even know about the bloodbath of 1939-1945.
That's who the smart money says is stirring the pot in the Ukraine.