US and Poland "working actively" on a deal to supply Ukraine with fighter jets | DW News

as russia continues its assault on ukraine the united states has indicated it's looking into ways for poland to supply fighter jets to ukraine u.s secretary of state anthony blinken said american-made f-16s could be sent to poland to replenish its stock of russian-made jets if warsaw decides to send them to ukraine pilots in the ukrainian air force are already trained to fly those russian aircraft lincoln made those comments on a trip to ukraine's neighbor moldova we are we're looking actively now at the question of airplanes that poland may provide to uh to ukraine and looking at how we might be able to backfill should poland decide to produce those to supply those planes let's get more on this development from journalist jan apollocott he's in warsaw jan thanks for joining us what is weighing on the polish government in making this decision well it looks like on one hand the polish side really would like to send it and we have indicators that it was kind of promised on certain level since the ukrainians know how to use these mig-29 um airplanes but at least i think thinking twice the polish side realized that sending fighter jets is a different story than just sending equipment military equipment on the ground and place it somewhere on the border and somebody else is picking it up if you send jets then you have to start from a polish airport and you have to go into the war zone and just days ago wasser was also correcting ukrainian claims and statements that they would not only receive these jets but also be allowed to operate from polish airports this was fastly and clearly um denied as being fake news right is there a risk then that this could be seen by putin as nato getting itself involved in the war and trigger an escalation yeah i think so poland has been urging more help but all the time also more lethal lethal military equipment but they seem to look very closely where's the red line to get too much involved into the war and days ago already polish president anja duda said that sending jets would mean a direct interference a kind of entry into the war the beginning of the war between a nato member and russia and he emphasized that poland and nato is not party in this conflict at least in the military sense so that's one side of poland's involvement in this conflict the other is refugees can you tell us more about poland's current assistance to those coming over its border yeah i would say there is a complete turnaround from polish opposition to the belarus crisis we've seen last year which is actually a little bit continuing here with migrants being sent back at the time now this was not so much a difference um to the extent of people's willingness to have we have seen this on the belarus side as well and but now the whole country has turned and the borders are widely open right now also for people of different color and origin who also are sometimes here occur on the ukrainian polish border so what we see is that poland is receiving more people in a few days than germany over the whole period during the 2015 crisis and as far as i can see they are not asking for help and foreign minister rao recently was asked whether they would ask for relocation or other assistance from other european countries but he just did not answer to that and i can cannot hear anything like this all right correspondent jan polarcott thank you very much for that

Channel: DW News

Views: 494,535

Keywords: DW News, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, NATO, Putin, Blinken, Mig, fighter jets, war in Ukraine, Russian invasion of Ukraine, Kyiv

Id: r3jbteyivik

Length: 3min 50sec (230 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 06 2022