to be high risk. and without characterizing something as high or low risk, in particular on the other inventory items, i would tell you we go through that calculus with every shipment that we send. what is best needed best neededt and with a mind that we obviously don t want to needlessly or heedlessly escalate the conflict. okay? i m sorry. thank you. the soldier who is are deployed to poland 82nd helping americans from ukraine. that s right. you mentioned the massive refugee flow. i wonder if the mission has or looking at expanding that to a wider humanitarian mission and maybe something you discussed with poland. there hasn t been active
poland has taken far more ukrainian refugees than any other nation in this conflict. it is a significant burden that they have to try to figure out how to deal with. they are looking to the u.s. to see what additional humanitarian assistance the united states will be able to provide as poland tries to step up and help its neighbor in its time of need. vice president landing right in the middle of the western response to this crisis, josh. thank you. peter alexander, the white house press secretary was asked about this polish fighter jet situation a little while ago. she had a farley straightforward question about whether the administration wants this transfer to happen, and she answered mostly talking about the logistics. what is the white house s position on trying to get these jets into the hands of ukrainian pilots? reporter: the white house has made it very clear they want to do something that would not be viewed as escalatory here. as courtney kube will detail in moments from
based on the information that they have available to them. and it is their assessment, one in which the secretary concurs that the transfer of combat aircraft right now could be mistaken by mr. putin and the russians as an escalatory step. as i said, we need to be careful every decision we make, that we aren t making the potential for escalation worse. because that s not only not good for nato and it is not only not good for the united states and our national security, should this conflict escalate even further, but it is certainly not going to be good for the ukrainian people to have what is already a destructive and terrible war get even more destructive and terrible, given the fact that mr. putin has other capabilities at his disposal. i have two questions. the first is on the mig 29.
needed them, so it was worth it? without getting into specific inventory issues, the short answer to your question is, yes. as we make the decisions to provide support, from the very beginning, even before the invasion, but certainly since, we go through that calculus, and to make sure that we are giving them what we believe can be best suited to their needs and we see they re using them. they re using it with great effect. but also keeping in mind as we must the potential escalation of the conflict. it is a calculation we do routinely, every day. it is not uncommon the stingers, the javelins or anti-a anti-armor, some of those have been considered high risk but the calculus is i wouldn t say everything that we re sending we consider
now, look, sovereign nations can decide for themselves what they want to do. but this idea, the proposal of transferring the jets to our custody and transferring to ukraine, that is something that we are not going to explore right now. jen? are you talking about providing s-300 missile defense systems? i would rather stay away from the actual systems themselves. we re going to continue to look at a broad swath of capabilities that the ukrainians could use effectively. some of them they already are and maybe they need replacements. is the difference in providing javelins and stingers to the ukrainians versus migs or fighter jets? why is that more provocative from an intelligence perspective? why is that scene as more provocative? it seems like you re splitting hairs there. there is no splitting hairs, jen. we take seriously the intelligence community s assessments and their views