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He later backtracked, saying countries would individually decide what to do. The idea picked up traction in Congress. Many looked to Poland, as one of three nations that could provide the MIG fighters — which, by definition, are three decades old and hardly up to modern standards. (The Ukrainians want these planes because they know how to fly them — old MIGs, left over from Soviet days, make up their air force.)

But then Poland began to think about the Russian threats to attack any country that allowed Ukrainian jets to lift off from their airfields to engage Russian forces.

So Poland said it wanted to hand the planes over to the U.S. base at Ramstein, Germany, turning it into something of a used-plane lot for Cold War aircraft. It was up to the Americans, they said, to fix them up and give them to Ukraine.

American officials believe that the jets, given Russia’s increasing anti-air capabilities in Ukraine, would have limited value to Ukraine and that they are not worth the risks they could pose to more effective means of bolstering the Ukrainian military. The move could, for example, prompt Russia to intensify its efforts to stop supply convoys carrying arms from allied countries.

Daniel Fried, a former senior State Department official and former U.S. ambassador to Poland, said the snafu seemed to have started with a miscommunication and snowballed from there.

“It feels like a mess. I suspect there is a chain of miscommunication that resulted in mixed signals to the Poles.”

“Borrell started it,” he said. “Then the U.S. failed to be clear with Poles and inadvertently gave mixed signals,’’ a reference to Mr. Blinken’s initial, seeming openness to the idea.

Mr. Fried concluded: “The administration needs not to explain why the MIGs are a bad idea. They need to explain what they will do to help the Ukrainians achieve what they wanted to achieve with the MIGs.”

Michael Crowley and Julian Barnes contributed reporting from Washington.