The two countries Ukraine might have attacked are supposed to be on the same side as Ukraine. From Ted Snider at theamericanconservative.com:
A key plank in the Western strategy to avoid negotiations with Russia and to continue financing and arming Ukraine has been the alarming insistence that Putin is bent on going beyond Ukraine and into Europe, not stopping until he has reestablished the Soviet empire. But simultaneous explosions of two oil refineries in Hungary and Romania raise the question of whether it is not Russia, but Ukraine, that is going beyond its borders and expanding the war to Europe.
From the start of the war, Ukraine, the United States and NATO have motivated Europe to back the war with the warning that if they do not, the war will come to them. In April 2024, U.S. Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith warned that NATO countries must “help Ukraine push Russia out of its territory… because if they do not succeed, of course, the concern is that Russia will feel compelled to keep going.”
The same warning was consistently broadcast from the very top in the United States, NATO and Ukraine. President Joe Biden told Congress that “If Putin takes Ukraine, he won’t stop there…. He’s going to keep going. He’s made that pretty clear.” Then Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin warned that “Putin will not stop at Ukraine.” And Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken explained that Putin has “made clear that he’d like to reconstitute the Soviet empire.” Then NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg insisted that “if Putin wins in Ukraine, there is real risk that his aggression will not end there.” Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky warned his Western partners that “this aggression, and Putin’s army, can come to Europe.” He said that “at the moment, it’s us, then Kazakhstan, then Baltic states, then Poland, then Germany. At least half of Germany.” “If Ukraine loses the war,” he said, “other countries will be attacked. This is a fact.”
It isn’t “a fact,” and he has never “made that pretty clear.” There is nothing on the historical record that suggests Putin has his sights set on Europe or on anything beyond keeping Ukraine out of NATO and protecting the rights of Ukraine’s ethnic Russians. Putin has repeated from the start that “the Ukraine crisis is not a territorial conflict, and I want to make that clear…. The issue is much broader and more fundamental and is about the principles underlying the new international order.” That Moscow’s goal is keeping Ukraine out of NATO, and not moving Russia into Europe, has been corroborated at the highest levels by Ukraine’s negotiating team, by NATO, and even by Zelensky.
