A plane carrying Polish President Lech Kaczynski and more than 80 of his country's most influential military and political leaders crashed as it tried to land through a thick fog in western Russia on Saturday morning, killing everyone aboard.
"The Polish presidential plane did not make it to the runway while landing. Tentative findings indicate that it hit the treetops and fell apart," Russian regional governor Sergei Anufriev said on the Rossiya-24 news channel. "Nobody has survived the disaster." Among the casualties were the commanders of all four branches of Poland's military, the head of the nation's central bank, the deputy foreign minister, and many of the president's other top advisers. According to Russia's Emergency Ministry, 96 people died in the crash, 88 of whom were part of the Polish delegation.
President Kaczynski, 61, was arriving for a ceremony commemorating the 70th anniversary of the killing of more than 20,000 Polish officers by the Soviet secret police in Katyn (near the site of the crash) after the Red Army invaded Poland in 1939.
Polish-Russian relations had been strained for decades following the massacre, which Russia has never officially apologized for. But Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's recent decision to attend the memorial ceremony in the forest near Katyn was seen as a gesture of reconciliation. Putin will now head a commission investigating the crash, the Kremlin said.
Former president Lech Walesa, who presided over Poland's transition from communism, cast the crash in similarly historic terms in a statement to The New York Times. "This is the second disaster after Katyn," he said. "They wanted to cut off our head there, and here the flower of our nation has also perished."
According to the BBC, Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk described the crash as the most tragic event in the country's post-World War II history. After an emergency meeting of ministers, Tusk, who runs the day-to-day business of government, said a week of national mourning has been declared, starting with two minutes of silence on Sunday at midday.
As Poland mourns, questions are already surfacing as to why Kaczynski and so many senior members of his government were flying aboard a 20-year-old Soviet-designed Tupolev Tu-154. For several years, critics have called for the presidential plane to be upgraded.
According to Poland's Constitution an early presidential election will be held, and in the meantime the speaker of the lower house of Parliament, Bronislaw Komorowski, will be acting president.
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