the polish said they would send them to ramstein air base in germany, and then the us backfilled a donation to ukraine with f 16 jets, but that was not acceptable to the us and the deal fell apart. but what we have seen in the last year is that countries willing to send western tanks, the appeals from ukraine for modern fighterjets, well, they have not got modern fighterjets, but at the moment we are hearing it will be four polish mig 29s that they will give ukraine and there will be more to come but it crosses a threshold. although it does not mean you will see a flood of western countries like the us and the uk offering to provide modern western jets, as we saw what happened with tanks. first of all, soviet tanks given to ukraine from eastern european countries and eventually the west providing modern main battle tanks has happened but i do not think this signals that the west
it is a very important logistic part for the russian army and for the fsb personal to be send to the occupied territory to do the, to the duty. it is seen, and lots of people suspect that it is an attack by ukrainians in the heart of the russian military effort in the south. where this war is heading at this moment as we talk about bakhmut, two quick points, general moore first you, we have learned today that ukraine will be getting fortify jets specifically mig 29s from poland in the coming days, they re trained on those, will that change anything for ukraine. it will definitely help the effort, they ve lost aircraft during the operations over the last year. but i think the best thing about mig 29s coming from uphold ukrainians know how to fly and
send fighter jets to the kyiv government, the first and only nato ally to make that commitment. cnn senior international correspondent ivan watson is joining us live from kharkiv in eastern ukraine. this is a significant move by poland to provide these fighter jets. walk us through the potential impact. and might other nato nations follow poland s lead? reporter: poland out in front here with the polish president saying four of these mig 29s will be handed over in a matter of days and suggesting there could be a dozen or more on the way after that. there s been discussion about this, but now these seem to be the most concrete steps towards handing them over. the white house has said that handing over f-16s is not in the cards right now, not on the table right now. the advantage here is that these
transfer the mig 29s from poland and other talking f-16s. given everything they need to enact this fight. sue and i want to play this, and unusual answer the president gave on the chinese spy balloon. i want your take on this. let me ask about chinese relations, already strained after the chinese spy balloon over the u.s. let me just ask you this first: do we know definitively yet whether or not that s my balloon is flying over the continental u.s. intentionally? it is almost not relevant. once it was over the united states. so there s a possibility that president xi didn t know? there s a possibility that. trace: not relevant, xi might not have known. your final thoughts? it s more event it doesn t sound possible. this is going to be a catty statement, but that s one of those comments where if someone makes a statement like that, you ought to take them in for a urinalysis. we know president xi knows about it.
team. from my perspective, if we are planning for the long hall because putin is planning for a long war, then we ought to start training the pilots now. it takes months. if we get to the fall saying now you re finally ready to be able to go. we don t have any planes ready. i think that president biden ought to at least allow them to start training on the f-16. in the meantime, i think poland has offered to have mig 29s. right now they re playing defense. the russians are crushing them. assaulting them from long-range with cruise missiles and other times of artillery. long-range even from russian territory, even from the black sea. they re on their heels trying to hold. i think we have to give them the capability of going on the offense. not just the counter.