white house divides the alliance and signals weakness to putin by refusing to let warsaw send fighter jets to ukraine. the white house blinked. do you see it that way? because the word from the pentagon is that they consider this to be escalating. this is again something i really don t understand. russia is on the war of extermination. they are trying to get rid of ukrainian people and ukraine as a country. they are standing and fighting with everything they ve got and we have capabilities that we could give them to help them defend themselves. this is not american troops, this is not even american aircraft. we are refusing to facilitate them getting to ukraine. ukraine already has mig 29s that they re trying and air fields and trained pilots. they could really use the help. i don t see why this is any different than giving them stingers or javelins. bill: let me probe that.
reasons, we should be a bit careful going into every specific type of weapons system we are delivering. but the message from today is that we really need to step up to provide more support. i welcome the announcement from the united states and other allies to provide more funding for military assistance and of course it s first and foremost a courage of the ukrainian armed forces that s stopped and hold back the russian invasion, but the training and the support of nato allies continue to divert military equipment has of course been essential in enabling them to fight back against the invading russian forces. but you can t confirm now, i understand the sensitivity here, but you can t confirm now that planes, specifically the mig 29s, will be part of this package? i cannot go into the specific.
point. so the population here in lviv has increased now by an estimated 500,000. one of the things we re seeing with people in town getting creative and converting spaces into emergency living quarters for people and that s how everyone is getting by. everyone is pitching in. a lot of the food you see is donated. all hands on deck, bill. bill: wow. thank you, mike tobin watching that for us today. dana: the u.s. military confirmed it sent two patriot missiles defense systems to poland amid fears that the war in ukraine could spill over there as nato and the u.s. have provided hundreds of millions of dollars worth of weapons to ukraine. niall fergurson is here and your passion has come through. you have lot of friends in ukraine. do you have an opinion about the migs and this whole dust-up with poland and the united states and whether the decision by the white house that it would have been too seen as to escalating to putin was the
fly into airbase contested with russia over ukraine raises serious concerns for the entire nato alliance. it s simply not clear to us that there is a substantive rationale for it. the pentagon said they were in touch for polish authorities on the possibility of this happening. the u.s. said they re okay with poland transferring the mig 29s, but it s a decision of the polish government. and they said they were blindsided and surprised by poland s offer. can the u.s. and nato get their aircraft to the ukrainian air force remains an open question with little statement of how it will work. oren lieberman, cnn newsroom.
i don t think the chinese, i don t think they want to get sucked into this. they wouldn t mind helping russia on the financial side because they have an advantage to breaking up the western-led economic order of the world. militarily they ll be cautious. if they were to become more involved, that would be one more element of internationalization of this. putin has already used the territory of belarus, and i would not at all be surprised to see he ends up hitting nato forces even by accident as we re supplying the ukrainians and he s trying to knock out those supplies. you re aware of the public debate right now about the level of u.s. military assistance for ukraine. you re sending a whole host of weapons that have had an impact on the battlefield but have taken a no-fly zone off the table, also sending these mig 29s from poland to ukraine. do you believe there should be more aggressive u.s. military assistance, and to what degree