Can Nato help Ukraine without provoking Putin?

Nato is trying to walk a tightrope in Ukraine. It wants the Russian invasion to be defeated, as the US joint chiefs of staff declaration that ‘We will make a second Afghanistan for Russia’ in Ukraine makes clear. But it also doesn’t want to do things that would enable Moscow to escalate the conflict on the basis that Nato has entered the war.

This dilemma is behind the problem with the Polish MIGs. Fighter jets are both offensive and defensive weapons and if they are flown into Ukraine from Nato airspace, things get very tricky. This is why Washington has rejected the Polish scheme to hand them over to the US and then have the Americans get them into Ukraine. (Indeed, it would have been far better for this whole thing not to have been done so publicly. If the negotiations had all been done in secret, it might have been possible to slip the planes into Ukraine in a deniable way, as has happened in the past.