The crash of Kaczynski's plane in Russia: a new scandal flared up around the Smolensk disaster

In Poland, a political scandal erupted around a journalistic investigation that showed that the parliamentary commission investigating the circumstances of the “Smolensk disaster” in 2010 could have withheld from the public some of the essential data about the crash of the presidential plane, reports with the BBC.

Photo: IStock

Journalists claim that the commission had at its disposal the results of examinations that called into question the conclusions of the report prepared by it that the explosion on board could have caused the crash of the presidential liner.

The Polish opposition is demanding that the commission be dissolved, without waiting for the publication of its final report, and that its head, former Defense Minister Antony Macierewicz, be brought to justice. Representatives of the authorities, headed by Matserevich himself, insist on the correctness of the commission's conclusions and accuse opponents of working for the Kremlin.

What happened in Smolensk

On the morning of April 10, 2010, a plane crash occurred near Smolensk, which claimed the lives of Polish President Lech Kaczynski and 95 other people. Among the dead were almost the entire high command of the Polish armed forces, members of the government, members of parliament, the head of the national bank.

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An investigation by the International Aviation Committee of the CIS showed that the cause of the crash was the wrong actions of the crew of the presidential aircraft, which made the decision to land despite poor visibility.

A parallel investigation of the disaster was also carried out by Polish specialists. Their first report broadly echoed the findings of the IAC. However, reservations were made in it regarding the errors of the Smolensk airport controllers, as well as its insufficient technical equipment.

Both the Polish and Russian reports were criticized from the very beginning by supporters of the deceased president, led by his twin brother Yaroslav Kaczynski.

Already in the first days after the crash of the presidential airliner, it was overgrown with a huge number of conspiracy theories, whose supporters refused to believe that it was “just” a plane crash.

Media sympathetic to Kaczynski actively fueled these rumors. One could read in them that the presidential plane exploded before it hit the ground, that the Polish pilots were misled by artificial fog sprayed over the airfield. Based on these theories, documentaries and feature films were shot, books were written.

The “Smolensk birch” occupied a special place in these theories. According to the first examinations, it was after the plane collided with a tree growing near the airport that part of the plane’s left wing broke off.

Opponents of the “official version” of the disaster questioned the ability of the birch tree to cause such serious damage to the aircraft; A sad meme about the “armored birch” has come into use among Poles.

The exploitation of the theme of “revealing the truth about Smolensk,” according to many experts, was the reason for the victory of Kaczynski’s party in the 2015 elections. After them, the brother of the deceased president became one of the most influential people in the state.

The report of Polish experts, prepared under the previous government, was immediately annulled. In 2016, the Polish parliament created its own commission to investigate the crash. It was headed by one of the closest associates of Kaczynski, who at that time held the post of Minister of Defense of the country, Anthony Matserevich.

The final report of this investigation has not yet been published. However, from time to time the commission posts on its website the texts of new interim reports - the last of them is dated April of this year. And the head of the commission, now former Defense Minister Macierewicz, actively comments on the progress of its work.

So, back in 2018, he stated that the cause of the disaster was two explosions on board the presidential liner.

The Macierewicz Commission's latest report to date repeats this conclusion. The conclusions to the 338-page document say that the cause of the plane crash was two explosions. The first of them tore off part of the left wing of the airliner (according to the conclusion of the first examinations, this happened as a result of the wing hitting the “Smolensk birch”), the second occurred six seconds later in the left center section of the aircraft.

“The device that caused the explosion contained RDX as well as pentrite and TNT,” the report said.

“The transfer of the Tu-154M for repairs to the Samara enterprise Aviakor, owned by Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch and friend of the then Prime Minister of the Russian Federation V.V. Putin, was of key importance. Control over the repairs made it possible to install an explosive device inside the left wing. At the planned time and place, using a coded communication channel, it was possible to cause an explosion of the left wing of the Tupolev. The aircraft began to rotate around its axis, which at some point led to a second explosion,” the document reads.

Polish and Russian experts who took part in the investigation of the disaster earlier, back in 2018, criticized Macierewicz’s conclusions; since then, their assessment of his research has not changed. Vladimir Putin even then called them “a bluff, nonsense and nonsense.”

"Bloopers" of the report

Last week's investigation by TVN24, a Polish private television channel often critical of the current government, was called "The Power of Lies" and was perhaps the most comprehensive collection to date of the inconsistencies contained in the Macierewicz commission's report.

Some of them have appeared in media materials before. For example, the testimony of Nikolai Bodin, on whose property that same ill-fated birch tree grew, he personally saw at what altitude the plane flew over his temporary hut, and it was significantly lower than the one on which the Matserevich commission relied in its calculations. Or the words of Polish cameraman Slawomir Wisniewski, who was one of the first to arrive at the scene of the disaster, that he did not hear any separate explosions, except for one large one - when the plane collided with the ground.

The authors of the investigation spoke with acoustics expert Miroslav Tarasyuk. It was his expertise that the commission relied on, claiming that the “black boxes” on board the plane recorded the sound of an explosion.

“I would like to responsibly state that I did not identify the signal under investigation as an explosion. We are talking about selective use of my research,” Tarasyuk told reporters.

Investigators reminded viewers that the presence of trace amounts of explosives on board the plane - which the Macierewicz commission interpreted as evidence of the presence of an explosive device on the plane - has a prosaic explanation. The presidential Tupolev was often used to transport Polish military personnel - for example, peacekeepers - and in the archives you can find a lot of footage confirming this. Microscopic particles of explosives could easily have remained on the soldiers' uniforms or hair, the investigation says. And the hypothesis that the bombers decided to use three different types of explosives at once to make the bomb looks very strange, journalists add.

“The Macierewicz Commission interpreted the evidence before it selectively... Writing reports with pre-formulated conclusions was the standard of its work from the very beginning,” they quote Marek Dąbrowski, a former member of the commission who resigned from its membership in protest at its opaque methods work.

American expertise

However, the real “bomb” of the journalistic investigation was the publication in it of fragments of a large-scale examination conducted by the authoritative American National Institute of Aviation Research at Wichita University (NIAI).

Journalists emphasize the significance and scale of this examination: out of 30 about $7,5 million allocated from the budget for the work of the Matserevich commission, eight million were spent on paying for this study.

The report of the Polish commission extensively cites the conclusions of this examination. However, according to journalists, the Matserevich commission chose to quote in their document only those fragments that could confirm the conclusion about the explosion on board the aircraft.

Evidence that an “ordinary” plane crash occurred near Smolensk, not associated with any explosions on board the aircraft, was simply ignored, the investigation says.

For example, the Macierewicz commission ignored a computer simulation of the last seconds of the Tupolev flight, which suggested that the plane actually hit a birch tree with its wing and, as a result, turned over in the air. The scattering of aircraft debris and even the shape of the grooves in the ground modeled in this simulation actually completely coincide with the picture at the scene of the accident.

NIAI experts, according to a journalistic investigation, removed from Russia several samples of birch trees growing there, approximately the same diameter as the tree in the Bodina site. A computer study of the properties of these samples allowed American experts to conclude that in the event of a Tu-154 wing colliding with such an obstacle and at such a speed, most likely, the wing will be broken, moreover, with approximately the same break line as in the crash of the presidential airliner.

The results of this examination were also not included in the report of the Matserevich commission and were not presented to the public at all.
In addition, the Macerevich commission ignored the conclusion of American experts that the damage to the severed end of the Tupolev wing could well have been caused by its collision with the Smolensk birch tree. The Polish commission unequivocally stated: such deformations of the wing frame could only be caused by an explosion from within the structure.

The authors of the investigation claim that the Americans handed over the full text of the examination to Matserevich back in December 2020. He chose to use only fragments suitable for the version of the explosion, and concealed the rest.

In addition, comparing the list of expertise ordered by the Matserevich commission and the list of results used by it, the journalists come to the conclusion that in its report the commission ignored the achievements of several other prominent Western experts in the field of aviation security.

In response to a request from journalists about why the report did not contain the full conclusions of the examinations, the Matserevich Commission replied: all examinations, studies and analyzes were taken into account and are available in the appendices to the report.

TVN journalists call this statement a lie: they insist that a significant part of the data is still not available.

“Empire of Lies” and “Putin’s Agents”

The very next day after the publication of the investigation, opposition member of the Polish Sejm Adam Szlapka filed a complaint with the Prosecutor General against the head of the “Smolensk Commission”: in it Szlapka accused Macierewicz of forging documents and concealing evidence.

On the same day, the Matserevich commission itself reacted to the investigation.

“The accusations and pseudo-arguments [contained in the material] are false and represent the Russian point of view,” her statement said. The commission added that it would later respond to all specific allegations raised in the investigation.

And on September 14, the discussion of the investigation became the topic of the day in the Polish Parliament.

First, the oppositionist Barbara Nowatskaya, the daughter of one of the victims of the Smolensk disaster, ex-Deputy Prime Minister Isabela Jaruga-Novatskaya, turned to Prime Minister Mateusz Mazowiecki, who was present at the meeting, demanding that the Macierewicz Commission be immediately stopped.

Then she turned to Yaroslav Kachinsky, who was sitting in the hall.

“How can you look at yourself in the mirror after you built an empire of lies that allowed you to gain power on the coffin of your brother, your daughter-in-law, your friends and my mother. Shame on you! A shame!" - she said emotionally.

When Jaroslaw Kaczynski himself came to the podium of the Sejm, he limited himself to a short remark: “I knew that there were Putin’s agents here, but I had no idea that there were so many of them.”

At this, the discussion of the investigation in the parliamentary hall ceased, but in the following days it went beyond the limits of the Seimas.

The opposition still calls for Macierewicz to answer, calling him perhaps the main culprit for the split in Polish society on the basis of the “hidden truth about Smolensk.” In recent days, the authorities have been trying to shift the focus of the discussion... to the “Ukrainian issue.”

“Polish weapons transferred to the Ukrainians - hundreds of tanks, howitzers and missiles - are destroying the Russian occupiers. And it was during the victorious Ukrainian counter-offensive that a massive attack began on the Polish government, which so powerfully supports Ukraine,” these were the words that began the material about the “Smolensk” investigation in a news release on the state television channel TVP.

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The overwhelming majority of Poles, watching the war unleashed by Russia in Ukraine, sympathize with the Ukrainians. In theory, the transition of the discussion in this direction could help the authorities get out of this scandal with minimal image losses.

However, published on September 19, the data of a poll conducted by the United Service marketing company for the WP.pl service showed that almost 60% of Poles believe that Antony Macierewicz is misleading the public in the case of the Smolensk disaster, while only 24% of respondents believe him.

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