Zelensky: Ukraine unites in grief with Polish people on anniversary of Smolensk disaster
On the 13th anniversary of the Smolensk disaster, Ukraine unites in grief with the Polish people and honors the memory of the deceased, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky said on Twitter.
"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 wife, and all those who died in the name of serving the motherland. Eternal memory!" said the president.
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In a plane crash on April 10, 2010, near the Smolensk-North military airfield, a Polish government plane with 96 people on board crashed. The plane crash killed the presidential couple Lech and Maria Kaczyński, the entire military command of the Polish army, and a large part of the country's Polish political, religious, and public elite.
They 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 investigated the causes of the crash, and the Interstate Aviation Committee in Moscow called the mistakes of the Polish plane crew the leading cause. The Polish commission placed considerable responsibility on the Russian 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 airport.
After the right-wing conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party of 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 investigation.
Since then, the bodies of all the disaster victims have been exhumed, and all the records of the "black boxes" and elements of the crashed plane have been re-examined to detect explosives.
Samples of the collected materials were sent to several international laboratories, which were supposed to confirm or exclude 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 in the disaster.
