Poland Demands Russian Findings on Crash

(WSJ.com) WARSAW—Poland's government for the first time voiced official dissatisfaction with Moscow for what it said was a failure to share findings from its investigation into an April plane crash that killed Poland's president.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk on Monday said Warsaw has yet to receive documents it has requested and called on Russia to turn over "precise information" uncovered during its probe of the crash, near an airfield in Smolensk.

Mr. Tusk, using pointed language, said if the information isn't forthcoming he expected Moscow to provide "explanations of what kind of reasons make it difficult for the Russian side to transfer documents."

Russian officials have said the country has already handed over everything it has.

Frustration has mounted in Warsaw in the months since the disaster, which unsettled Polish politics and sent the country into a period of national mourning. Further friction over the investigation could threaten recent progress on mending relations between the two countries.

Mr. Tusk's government has promoted warmer ties with Moscow, a contrast with the more skeptical view of Russia—rooted in the country's Soviet-era subjugation of Poland—held by former President Lech Kaczynski, who was killed in the crash, and his conservative Law and Justice party.

Bronislaw Komorowski, the standard-bearer of Mr. Tusk's more liberal Civic Platform party, defeated Mr. Kaczynski's brother in the July election to choose his successor. But the crash has helped fuel a conservative grassroots movement. Right-leaning politicians and commentators have voiced suspicions about the Polish government's acceptance of Russian investigators' official findings.

Last month, Russia's deputy prime minister, Sergei Ivanov, was quoted by Russian news agency ITAR-TASS as saying: "There is nothing more to transfer. We have transferred everything there was to transfer."

Polish prosecutors have demanded that Russia provide information about the work of air-traffic controllers at the airport in Smolensk, as well as about airport equipment and Russian aviation procedures, according to a Monday report in the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza.

A transcript of cockpit conversations released by Poland showed that pilots of the doomed jet attempted to land in thick fog despite warnings from airport controllers and another Polish crew that had landed at the airport earlier that day. But controllers didn't decide to close the airport and divert the plane.

The Russian controllers ordered pilots of the Polish presidential jet to pull up just seconds before the plane struck trees and crashed into a ravine less than a mile short of the runway. Polish investigators have said they suspect faulty radar may have given the controllers imprecise readings of the plane's altitude.