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My God – what a horrible morning for Poland. I took Ripley to the vet this morning, came home and saw this tragedy. The president of Poland was killed in a plane crash, as well as the first lady, dozens of government leaders, and the commanders of all four branches of the military. Just an awful, awful tragedy.
A plane carrying the Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, and dozens of the country’s top political and military leaders crashed in a heavy fog in western Russia on Saturday morning, killing everyone aboard.
Television showed chunks of flaming fuselage scattered in a bare forest near Smolensk, where the president was arriving for a ceremony commemorating the murder of more than 20,000 Polish officers by the Soviet secret police after the Red Army invaded Poland.
The governor of Smolensk region, Sergei Antufiyev, said the plane did not reach the runway but instead hit the treetops and broke apart. His spokesman later said that air traffic controllers had recommended the president’s jet land at another airport because of bad visibility, but that the crew decided to land anyway. The crash came as a staggering blow to Poland, wiping out a large swath of the country’s leadership, including the commanders of all four branches of the military, the head of the central bank, the president and many of his top advisors. In the numb hours after the crash, leaders in Warsaw evoked the horror of the massacre at Katyn, which stood for decades as a symbol of Russian domination.
“It is a damned place,” former president Aleksander Kwasniewski told TVN24. “It sends shivers down my spine. First the flower of the Second Polish Republic is murdered in the forests around Smolensk, now the intellectual elite of the Third Polish Republic die in this tragic plane crash when approaching Smolensk airport.”
We all lost a great leader this morning. There are really no words to describe this tragedy. The nation of Poland is understandably in shock today. Keep them in your thoughts and prayers.
Cross-posted at Stop the ACLU.
Chris M-G says: Let us hope that the bumbler in chief can say SOMETHING intelligent about this.
Mat says: Why do I get the awful feeling that this will have a detrimental impact on the war effort, ally-wise?
Cylar says: I’m almost wondering if the Russian government had something to do with it. They aren’t exactly friendly to the Polish these days, and it would certainly do something towards getting rid of that country’s pro-Western leadership.
This was not just an ordinary plane crash. I would not blame Russia for making the plane go down. Instead look at the mossad/Israel and the Marxist Robin Hood in the white house.
Somebody asked reasonably, why the heck did the whole government fly on one plane? Even big US companies won’t let their execs fly in one plane.
One theory might be that they couldn’t afford a second plane.
I don’t think this is a hit job. Tupolevs are notoriously bad airplanes; the weather was nasty; at least one report has it that the airport told the pilot to go somewhere else – and he didn’t. Maybe they were running short of gas.
It’s just a bad, tragic scene all around. One Polish source said something like, “another generation lost at Katyn” (the first being the massacre they were traveling to commemorate).
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