Poland has asked Germany for formal approval to deliver MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine.
Poland received the planes from the former East Germany and still has around a dozen.
A condition of the original sale was that Berlin has to approve the plane's redeployment to our third country.
Poland has already transferred four fighter jets to Kiev, becoming its first ally to do so.
Germany's defence minister Boris Pistorius says Poland's request will be dealt with as quickly as possible.
First of all, I can confirm that this request exists, it's been made.
The Chancellery is now in consultation with us and all those involved.
And we've confirmed that an answer will be sent to our Polish partners during the course
of the day."
Let's get more from our political correspondent, Hans Brandt.
Welcome Hans.
How is Berlin likely to react to this Polish request?
It's very likely to approve this request. It seems that the decision has basically been made and I think one can assume that in the background Poland and Germany have been talking about this for some time and have come to some sort of agreement.
And what we are seeing now is basically the public announcement, the public execution,
as it were, of this process.
And as the German defence minister has said, this will be – a decision will be announced
in the course of today, in other words, in the next
few hours that's very likely to be an approval and in that sense Germany will
be in line with a number of its NATO allies apart from Poland Slovakia has
also sent about four planes to Ukraine and has announced that it will send
another nine or so Finland has talked about the possibility of sending planes
Netherlands has considered
has said that it is considering this so it's not as if this would be completely out of line with
what the allies are doing. Right but Germany itself has ruled out sending planes which is
interesting given its position on battle tanks it refused to send battle tanks in the past
and then that decision changed. Are we likely to see a similar shift on jets?
I think what we can say is that, in general, during this war in Ukraine, the Russian attack
on Ukraine, there have been a number of red lines that have been crossed, including the
one about battle tanks that you mentioned.
What we're seeing at the moment is the delivery of very old...
planes from the Soviet area. These planes are something like 30 years old. They're not
top technology at all anymore. And what the politicians involved have been saying is that
Ukraine has these planes already is already flying them. So it's not a problem for them
to be integrated into the Ukrainian forces and at the same time delivering these planes.
This will not increase the Ukrainian capability, for instance, to attack Russian territory.
If we start talking about more modern Western technology jets, things change very completely.
That would be a much better question.
bigger step to take if those were to be delivered to Ukraine. Germany has always maintained
that in these decisions it will always coordinate its actions with those of its allies, especially
of the United States. There are some discussions going on within NATO and in the United States
to send modern Western jets to Ukraine, but there's
far from a decision being taken on that.
And so it's very unlikely in the near future
that Germany will send jets of its own to Ukraine.
Hank, with that, Hans, political correspondent Hans Brand.