Poland to Relive Doomed Presidential Flight

(By Marcin Sobczyk, wsj.com)

The Polish government on Friday will present its view of what led to last year’s plane crash in which President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others died in western Russia. Poland’s report on the catastrophe, likely to put part of the responsibility on Russian air controllers, may ruffle feathers in Moscow, which has put the blame squarely on the Poles.

Nuns look at the Sarcophagus of Lech Kaczynski and Maria Kaczynska in Kracow, Poland, on the first anniversary of the plane crashed that killed the Polish president and 95 others.

It will also be a landmark event ahead of parliamentary elections planned for October. The Polish public is increasingly divided over politics, and the plane crash is a crucial orientation point. Poland’s two main political parties, whose leaders once referred to each other as “dear friends,” now fight no-holds-barred and have accused each other of turning the coffins of the crash victims into political weaponry.

The crash of what formally was an airplane owned and operated by the government — not the president’s office — took place on the watch of Prime Minister Donald Tusk and his defense minister. It killed not only Mr. Tusk’s archrival, President Kaczynski, but also scores of politicians and the top commanders of the army, who were headed for an event commemorating a World War II-era massacre of Polish prisoners of war killed on Joseph Stalin’s orders in what was then the Soviet Union.

For Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of the conservative opposition, the loss was deeply personal: The president was his identical twin brother. The surviving Mr. Kaczynski and his Law and Justice party have repeatedly said Mr. Tusk is trying to cover up his administration’s shortcomings, which they say may have contributed or even caused the crash. The government has dismissed this claim.

More than 15 months later, many of the circumstances of the crash are known, described by investigating committees both in Poland and Russia. The Russian-made Tupolev aircraft that carried the Polish president crashed on approach as its pilots — inadequately trained, as it turned out — tried to land despite extremely thick fog at a provincial Russian airport that lacked the instruments necessary for navigation in extreme conditions.

The equipment that Russian controllers had in their shabby control tower was inadequate for guiding the airplane. The controllers advised the pilots against landing, but they wrongly insisted that they were on the right path, according to earlier statements by the Polish government.

Just 20 seconds before the crash, one of the pilots said they were aborting the landing, but mysteriously the plane continued its fatal descent. According to leaks in the Polish press, automatic systems failed to react because they were unarmed or needed a counterpart that was missing at the airport, which the pilots may have not known. What happened in those final seconds will be the most interesting part of Friday’s report, which is expected to include the details of experiments performed with another Tupolev aircraft the Polish government still owns.

The view from Moscow has been clear for months — the pilots are exclusively to blame. They operated under pressure from their superiors, including the president and the air force commander, whom the Moscow-based Interstate Aviation Committee suspects of being intoxicated with alcohol while aboard. Poland disputed those findings, but didn’t come forward with its objections publicly until a day after Tatyana Anodina, the head of the Moscow-based committee, presented her theories, complete with a gruesome cockpit recording of the doomed flight’s final seconds.

There’s been nothing to prove the Kaczynski camp’s competing theories — about artificial fog or even a secret intergovernmental plot to kill the Polish president. But Mr. Kaczynski has more sensible arguments to use against his political rival. He will be keen, for example, to remind voters that more than a year after the crash, the Polish airplane’s wreckage is still in Russia, which has ignored the Polish government’s repeated requests to hand it over.

For much of the Polish public, Moscow’s line was a slap in the face, while the Polish prime minister’s response seemed belated. When Mr. Tusk finally spoke, few outside the country were interested in what he had to say.

It cost him a few percentage points of support at the time. His party’s ratings have since recovered and an opinion poll published Thursday shows his Civic Platform party, with 47% of respondents declaring their support, well ahead of Mr. Kaczynski’s Law and Justice with 30%. Even though Mr. Tusk’s party in the past won fewer-than-expected votes during actual elections, the prime minister may be confident of his re-election.

He faces an opponent mobilized by his personal tragedy and a public divided over an emotional issue. Friday will be a field day for both leaders.