It's not 'magic'. It was over three decades of Western intelligence operations in Ukraine that lead to an unrecognized civil war, with the largest and fastest modern military build-up in the 21st century (in Ukraine). The point was to goad Russia into the conflict, and draw Europe away from Russia, which is extremely consistent with U.S. Middle Eastern policy. The chaos is the point. The 'mistake' they made is that their economists are fucking occult priests who don't actually understand how anything works, so they were unable to execute an affective sanctions campaign on Russia, which means the best way to draw Europe away from Russia is to lean more heavily on your allies (since you have a better idea of what they are doing).
It's the most consistent theory with what actually happened in Europe. The issue with Occam's or Hanlon's Razor for these things is that the way the CIA runs things, it has hundreds, if not thousands of pans in the fire at any given time, many of which are contradictory ends and do not know that the other exists, in Syria, they often funded opposing militia groups, and they then go to play with the hand that was dealt to them. As I said before, if anything the chaos and blowback is the point more than anything. If one operation goes south, there is another one that was positioned in a way to take advantage of that failure.
That doesn't mean they don't also just fuck everything up repeatedly, but the U.S. tendency is that when they fuck up something with an enemy, they make sure their allies are the ones who primarily have to pay for that mistake.