Zelensky on anniversary of Smolensk crash: We unite in grief with Polish people
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine made the statement on Twitter, Ukrinform reports.
"Today, on the 13th anniversary of the Smolensk disaster, we unite in grief with the Polish people and honor the memory of the President of Poland Lech Kaczyński, his spouse, and all those who died in the name of serving their Motherland. Eternal memory!" wrote the president.
As reported earlier, on April 10, 2010, a Polish government plane carrying 96 people on board crashed near the Smolensk-North military airfield. The presidential couple, Lech and Maria Kaczynski, the entire military command of the Polish army, and a large part of the Polish political and religious leaders, and the country's public elite were on their way to honor the victims of the Katyn crime on the 70th anniversary of that tragedy.
In 2011, the Polish government commission investigating the causes of the crash and the Interstate Aviation Committee in Moscow called the crew error the main cause of the crash. Also, the Polish commission placed significant responsibility on the Russian air traffic controllers at the Smolensk-North airfield, who provided partly false information to the crew and did not prohibit the landing of the Tu-154M at the airfield.
After the right-wing conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, led by Jarosław Kaczyński, came to power in Poland in 2015, the new government canceled the report of its predecessors, calling it illegitimate, and in February 2016 reopened the Smolensk crash probe. Since then, the bodies of all the victims of the disaster have been exhumed, and all the records of the black boxes and elements of the plane debris have been re-examined to detect explosives. Samples of the collected material were sent to several international laboratories, which were supposed to confirm or rule out the presence of explosive residues.
In Poland, the responsibility for the disaster was repeatedly placed on the Russians, hinting at the possible involvement of the Russian authorities.
