It started with Obama in 2011
Ukraine article excerpt
https://web.archive.org/web/20201102032416/https://ahtribune.com/world/europe/3622-how-the-war-in-ukraine-started.html
Those events — the coup and, three weeks later, the Crimean referendum — occurred in 2014, but the planning for the coup had already been going on for years, and it wasn’t being called off once Gallup reported in 2013 that most Crimeans loathed the U.S. The active operation to take over Ukraine had started actually on 1 March 2013 inside the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, which was almost 9 months before Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, on 20 November 2013, rejected the EU’s demand that Ukraine must bear the full $160 billion cost of abandoning its existing trading relationships with Russia and its allies, in order to join the EU. Wikipedia says that the overthrow of Yanukovych started on 21 November 2013 when he said no to the EU, but actually it started on 1 March 2013; and the planning for it had started by no later than June 2011. And it may be said to have begun even prior to that, when, near the very start of Obama’s Presidency, Obama called the then-Ukrainian-Presidential-candidate Yanukovych to Washington in order to sound him out on — if Yanukovych would become the winner — getting Ukraine into NATO, America’s anti-Russian military alliance. Getting Ukraine into the EU was really just to be a stepping stone to getting it into NATO so that U.S. nuclear missiles could be placed there against Moscow. This is what everything was really about. On 7 January 2010, the Kiev Post bannered “Yanukovych: Ukraine will remain a neutral state” and this is what actually sealed his fate. Yanukovych, with that now in his platform, won the Presidential election on 7 February 2010. So: he was in Obama’s gunsight even at the very moment when he won the Presidency.