Commentary The masters of the Kremlin fancy themselves as experts at the game of geopolitical chess. A fact as true of Tsarist Russia as it was of the Soviet Union and today’s contemporary Russia. Looking over the developing crisis in Ukraine over the past few months and the seemingly unrelated events that have swirled around it, from the European gas crisis to the recent dramatic, stepped up deployment of Russian naval forces across many of the world’s main shipping routes, it’s hard to shake the feeling that what we are observing is a carefully orchestrated plan to precipitate a regime change in Ukraine while demonstrating to the United States and its NATO allies that any intervention with be ineffective, prohibitively expensive in men and materials, and lead to an escalating confrontation. Suggesting that these events are all part of a carefully preconceived and orchestrated plan smacks of a conspiracy theory. …