Poland Celebrates a Year Since the Plane Crash near Smolensk that Killed the President and 96 High-ranked Officials
Plane Crash Near Smolensk (georgevalah.wordpress.com)
Russian president Dmitri Medvedev and his Polish counterpart Bronislaw Komorowski paid their respects on Monday at the site where a year ago President Lech Kaczynski and other 96 members of Polish high-profile leadership died as a result of a plane crash.
The presidents observed a minute’s silence for the dead on April 10, 2010 and attended the ceremonies near the western Russian city of Smolensk.
Even in this context, a new scandal was ready to break out as a plaque written in Polish said that Kaczynski was on his way to commemorate the 70th anniversary of “the Soviet genocide of Polish servicemen and officers” at Katyn.
Russian and Polish Presidents Attending Commemoration (rian.ru)
A new plaque was displayed in both Polish and Russian, without any reference to the killings at Katyn.
After this moment, Medvedev told the press that a monument would be built on the spot where the accident happened, and that he and the Polish counterpart would support this project.
In spite of the scandal over the plaque, Medvedev restated that the Soviet leadership in the 1940s were guilty for the death of the Polish officers at Katyn, an idea that gained momentum recently in Russia, as the Russian parliament approved this idea in the autumn of 2010, after half a century of denying it.
The reports about the conditions of the crash outraged Polish leadership and people as they were stating that the fault was of the pilots, who had no professional training for that kind of flight and were under pressure from the attendants of the delegation inside the plane.
The circumstances of the death that shook Poland and the entire world, practically beheading the country’s leadership altogether, remain a reason of serious scandal between the two nations involved.
A Polish man was charged on Monday with burning the effigy of the Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin during a protest in front of the Russian embassy in Warsaw over the weekend.
