President of Poland Killed in Plane Crash in Russia

President of Poland Killed in Plane Crash in Russia
By ELLEN BARRY and NICHOLAS KULISH
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 10, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/world/europe/11poland.html?hp


MOSCOW — A plane carrying the Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, his wife and other high-ranking officials crashed in a heavy fog in western Russia on Saturday morning, killing all aboard, Polish officials said.

Russian television showed chunks of still-flaming fuselage scattered in a bare forest near Smolensk, where the president was arriving for a ceremony commemorating the murder of more than 20,000 Polish officers by the Red Army as it invaded Poland.

The governor of Smolensk region, Sergei Antufiyev, said early reports suggested that the plane, landing in a thick fog, did not reach the runway but instead hit the treetops and fell apart. Russian President Dmitri A. Medvedev ordered top officials to rush to the scene and opened an investigation into the causes of the crash.

The crash came as a stunning blow to Poland, killing many of the country’s top leaders and reviving, for some, the horror of the Katyn massacre.

“It is a damned place,” former president Aleksander Kwasniewski told TVN24. “It sends shivers down my spine. First the flower of the Second Polish Republic is murdered in the forests around Smolensk, now the intellectual elite of the Third Polish Republic die in this tragic plane crash when approaching Smolensk airport.”

“This is a wound which will be very difficult to heal,” he said.

Former president Lech Walesa, who presided over Poland’s transition from communism, cast the crash in similar historic terms. “This is the second disaster after Katyn,” he told the news channel TVN-24. “They wanted to cut off our head there, and here the flower of our nation has also perished. Regardless of the differences, the intellectual class of those on the plane was truly great.”

The flag at the presidential palace in Warsaw was lowered as a crowd gathered, laying down flowers and lighting candles. According to Poland’s constitution, the leader of the lower house of parliament — now acting president — has 14 days to announce new elections, which must then take place within 60 days.

The plane was a Tupolev Tu-154, designed by the Soviets in the mid-1960s, and Polish officials had long complained about the country’s aging air fleet. Former prime minister Leszek Miller, who survived a helicopter crash in 2003, told a Polish news network he had long predicted such a disaster.

“I once said that we will one day meet in a funeral procession, and that is when we will take the decision to replace the aircraft fleet,” he said.

The crash site was cordoned off, but Russian media reported that the airplane’s crew made several attempts to land before a wing hit the treetops and the plane crashed about half a mile from the runway. Correspondents reporting from the scene said the plane’s explosion was so powerful that fragments of it were scattered as far as the outskirts of Smolensk, more than a mile from the crash site itself.

Among those on board the plane were Mr. Kaczynski; his wife, Maria; former Polish president-in-exile Ryszard Kaczorowski; the deputy speaker of Poland’s parliament, Jerzy Szmajdzin’ski; the head of the president’s chancellery, Wladyslaw Stasiak; and the head of the National Security Bureau, Aleksander Szczygo.

While the death toll included much of the government, several of Warsaw’s paramount leaders were not on board — notably Prime Minister Donald Tusk, Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski and Mr. Komorowski, the head of the lower house of parliament.

Mr. Kaczynski’s death on Russian soil is another tragic event in the tumultuous relationship between Russia and Poland.

The Polish president had been due in western Russia to commemorate the anniversary of the murder of thousands of Polish officers by the Soviet Union at the beginning of World War II.

The ceremonies were to be held at a site in the Katyn forest close to Smolensk, where 70 years ago members of the Soviet secret police executed more than 20,000 Polish officers captured after the Soviet Army invaded Poland in 1939.

The two countries had been making strides in recent months to improve their ties, which had long been strained. Poland was once a Soviet satellite, and has resented dominance by Moscow. After the collapse of Communism, it had embraced the West and snubbed Russia.

The Katyn massacre was one point of tension. On Wednesday, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin took a major step to address improve relations by becoming the first Russian or Soviet leader to join Polish officials in commemorating the anniversary. He was joined there by Mr. Tusk, Poland’s prime minister.

Mr. Putin cast the executions as one of many crimes carried out by the “totalitarian regime” of the Soviet Union.

“We bow our heads to those who bravely met death here,” he said at a ceremony on Wednesday. “In this ground lay Soviet citizens, burnt in the fire of the Stalinist repression of the 1930s; Polish officers, shot on secret orders; soldiers of the Red Army, executed by the Nazis.”

Russia halted mass-production of the Tu-154 roughly 20 years ago, making the Polish presidential jet, despite its age, one of the youngest of the roughly 200 of the planes that are still in service globally, said Paul Hayes, director of accidents and insurance at Ascend, an aviation consultancy in London.

Mr. Hayes said it was far too early to determine the cause of the accident, though he noted that crashes of V.I.P. aircraft are extremely rare. “When you’ve got the president of a country on board, the aircraft tends to be extremely well looked after and the crew are very experienced,” he said.

Michal Piotrowski contributed reporting from Warsaw, Clifford J. Levy from Moscow and Nicola Clark from Paris.