Ninety-seven people were killed including the president's wife, the deputy parliament speaker, the deputy foreign minister and the head of the National Bank of Poland.
"The entire top military brass, including the chief of defense and all the services, were on the plane," said Tomas Valasek, of the Center for European Reform. "If that is true, then you're looking at a situation, in effect, of the decapitation of the military services."
[snip]
James Sherr, head of Russia and Eurasia at the London-based think-tank Chatham House, said relations between the two countries were strained because of the continuing tensions over the massacre of tens of thousands of Polish people in during the 1940s and becasue of Poland's close relationship with the U.S.
At the time of the crash, Kaczynski had been traveling with his wife Maria and a high-level Polish delegation to Russia for the 70th anniversary of the massacre of Polish prisoners of war in the village of Katyn.
"Katyn has been the most difficult issue up to the present moment. Everyone in Poland knows that the Katyn massacre was a very small part of a systematic effort by Russians to get rid of a whole class of Polish people," said Sherr.
Sherr added that it would be good for relations between the two countries if there was an open and swift investigation into the crash.
On Saturday Russian President Dmitry Medvedev appointed Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to head an inquiry commission into the plane crash.
Russia admitted to the Katyn massacre in 1990, but will not release papers that could identify perpetrators in the massacre, said Sherr
Also see my last post for more Polish Crash anomalies...
Be seeing you.
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Such a convenient tragedy.
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