In Poland, the Memory of Smolensk Air Disaster Victims is Honored
On Wednesday, April 10, Poland is commemorating the memory of the 96 victims of the Smolensk air disaster, which occurred exactly 14 years ago in 2010. President of Poland Andrzej Duda visited the royal castle at Wawel in Krakow in the morning, where the resting place of the presidential couple Lech and Maria Kaczynski, who perished in the air crash in Russia, is located, as reported by PAP.
In honouring the memory of the deceased, Andrzej Duda called April 10 one of "the most difficult and tragic, yet significant days in Poland's history." The President also paid tribute to Polish officers killed by the NKVD in 1940, as well as to the Polish delegation tragically lost while travelling to Russia to honour compatriots lost in the past.
"Today, we again pay tribute, pray for their souls, and remember those lost on April 10, 2010," Duda remarked during a media interaction in Kraków.
A requiem service was also held in Warsaw, and later, a ceremony took place under the presidential palace with the participation of Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the brother of the deceased president. The ceremony commenced at 08:41 local time, marking the exact moment of the plane crash.
Recall that in 2010, near the "Smolensk-North" airfield in Russia, a Polish government plane crashed with 96 people on board. Among the victims were the President of Poland and his wife, military command, and members of the political and public elite.
The commission formed in 2011 to investigate the causes of the disaster identified errors by the plane's crew and Russian air traffic controllers as the main factors of the accident. However, after a change of government in Poland in 2015, the new administration dismissed the previous report and initiated a new investigation. Polish, Ukrainian, and Western media have repeatedly reported information suggesting possible involvement of Russian intelligence services in the air crash that claimed the lives of Poland's political elite.
In April-May 1940, Soviet special services executed about 22,000 Polish prisoners of war, most of whom were officers. The secret executions of prisoners, known as the Katyn tragedy, took place in Katyn near Smolensk, as well as in Kalinin, Kharkov, Kyiv, Minsk, and presumably other locations.
Despite being one of the best-documented war crimes of the Stalinist regime, Moscow's official stance until 1990 was that the Poles in Katyn were shot by the Germans in 1941 when they reached Smolensk. However, Moscow's arguments failed to convince researchers or the Nuremberg Tribunal.