Kathianne
04-10-2010, 03:32 AM
Hmmm:
Official: no survivors in Kaczynski plane crash - Yahoo! News (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100410/ap_on_re_eu/eu_russia_plane_crash)
Polish president's plane crashes in Russia; 87 die
22 mins ago
MOSCOW – Officials say a plane carrying Polish President Lech Kaczynski and his wife has crashed in western Russia and that at least 87 people have been killed.
The Polish Foreign Ministry confirmed that the president and his wife were aboard the plane that crashed Saturday near the city of Smolensk.
A spokeswoman for Russia's Emergencies Ministry, Irina Andrianova, said 87 people were killed but she had no details on their identity.
Yesterday in Russian paper:
What the Russian papers say | Top Russian news and analysis online | 'RIA Novosti' newswire (http://en.rian.ru/papers/20100408/158483693.html)
...Putin tries to untangle "Katyn knot" in Russian-Polish relations
On Wednesday, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin tried to unravel the "Katyn knot" which has been complicating relations between Moscow and Warsaw for the past 70 years and which serves as a pretext for boisterous accusation.
Putin invited his Polish counterpart, Donald Tusk, to Katyn, a village in the Smolensk Region, where he became the first Russian leader to visit a memorial cemetery where an estimated 4,000 Polish officers are buried. Somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 Polish prisoners of war were executed in the Soviet Union in 1940.
It was not until April 1990 that the Kremlin, in the person of Mikhail Gorbachev, admitted to perpetrating the Katyn massacre. In 1993, Russian President Boris Yeltsin visited the Powazki Cemetery monument to Katyn victims in Warsaw and uttered the famous phrase: "Forgive us!"
However, most of the archived documents remain classified, and the official culprit list is limited to Soviet secret service chiefs Lavrenty Beria, Vsevolod Merkulov and his henchmen. The European Court of Human Rights continues to receive lawsuits against Russia from Katyn-victim relatives.
Warsaw believes that, apart from normalizing relations, Moscow wants to attain other political goals. Unlike Prime Minister Tusk, no one invited Polish President Lech Kaczynski to Katyn, although he had publicly stated his desire to go.
Some Polish analysts believe that Moscow is trying to drive a wedge between the Polish president and the prime minister by openly supporting the liberal Tusk, rather than the conservative Kaczynski who has long irritated Moscow, almost to the same extent as Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili or former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko.
Bilateral relations hit an all-time low in 2006-2007 under Kaczynski's identical twin brother Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the then prime minister of Poland.
After Tusk became prime minister, he lifted the Polish veto on initial talks to conclude a new Russia-EU Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA), while Moscow agreed to resume Polish meat imports.
However, a bilateral thaw did not prevent Lech Kaczynski from visiting Tbilisi in August 2008 and supporting Saakashvili at a meeting during the Russian-Georgian conflict over the break-away province of South Ossetia.
Lech Kaczynski will vie against Bronislaw Komorowski, a Polish politician and member of the Civic Platform party together with Tusk, during the next Polish presidential election, scheduled to be held in the fall of 2010.
Russia avoids any contact with Kaczynski, including those initiated by him. Two months ago, President Dmitry Medvedev turned down an invitation to attend celebrations marking the 65th anniversary of liberating the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland even though a new Russian pavilion had opened there.
At their concluding news conference, Putin and Tusk agreed that the Russian goodwill gesture signified a turning point in bilateral relations. It appears, however, that the issue has not been removed from the political agenda.
Tusk cautioned that it should not be expected that everyone will make a similar assessment of the Katyn meeting. Putin set forth the Russian stance implying that humanitarian issues are the only factor hindering mutual understanding on the Katyn issue.
"We don't want to place the relatives of the deceased in an ambiguous situation," Putin said, hinting that Moscow's stance on the issue remained firm.
Gazeta.ru
...
Remember the Russian journalists that kept turning up dead for awhile?
Official: no survivors in Kaczynski plane crash - Yahoo! News (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100410/ap_on_re_eu/eu_russia_plane_crash)
Polish president's plane crashes in Russia; 87 die
22 mins ago
MOSCOW – Officials say a plane carrying Polish President Lech Kaczynski and his wife has crashed in western Russia and that at least 87 people have been killed.
The Polish Foreign Ministry confirmed that the president and his wife were aboard the plane that crashed Saturday near the city of Smolensk.
A spokeswoman for Russia's Emergencies Ministry, Irina Andrianova, said 87 people were killed but she had no details on their identity.
Yesterday in Russian paper:
What the Russian papers say | Top Russian news and analysis online | 'RIA Novosti' newswire (http://en.rian.ru/papers/20100408/158483693.html)
...Putin tries to untangle "Katyn knot" in Russian-Polish relations
On Wednesday, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin tried to unravel the "Katyn knot" which has been complicating relations between Moscow and Warsaw for the past 70 years and which serves as a pretext for boisterous accusation.
Putin invited his Polish counterpart, Donald Tusk, to Katyn, a village in the Smolensk Region, where he became the first Russian leader to visit a memorial cemetery where an estimated 4,000 Polish officers are buried. Somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 Polish prisoners of war were executed in the Soviet Union in 1940.
It was not until April 1990 that the Kremlin, in the person of Mikhail Gorbachev, admitted to perpetrating the Katyn massacre. In 1993, Russian President Boris Yeltsin visited the Powazki Cemetery monument to Katyn victims in Warsaw and uttered the famous phrase: "Forgive us!"
However, most of the archived documents remain classified, and the official culprit list is limited to Soviet secret service chiefs Lavrenty Beria, Vsevolod Merkulov and his henchmen. The European Court of Human Rights continues to receive lawsuits against Russia from Katyn-victim relatives.
Warsaw believes that, apart from normalizing relations, Moscow wants to attain other political goals. Unlike Prime Minister Tusk, no one invited Polish President Lech Kaczynski to Katyn, although he had publicly stated his desire to go.
Some Polish analysts believe that Moscow is trying to drive a wedge between the Polish president and the prime minister by openly supporting the liberal Tusk, rather than the conservative Kaczynski who has long irritated Moscow, almost to the same extent as Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili or former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko.
Bilateral relations hit an all-time low in 2006-2007 under Kaczynski's identical twin brother Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the then prime minister of Poland.
After Tusk became prime minister, he lifted the Polish veto on initial talks to conclude a new Russia-EU Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA), while Moscow agreed to resume Polish meat imports.
However, a bilateral thaw did not prevent Lech Kaczynski from visiting Tbilisi in August 2008 and supporting Saakashvili at a meeting during the Russian-Georgian conflict over the break-away province of South Ossetia.
Lech Kaczynski will vie against Bronislaw Komorowski, a Polish politician and member of the Civic Platform party together with Tusk, during the next Polish presidential election, scheduled to be held in the fall of 2010.
Russia avoids any contact with Kaczynski, including those initiated by him. Two months ago, President Dmitry Medvedev turned down an invitation to attend celebrations marking the 65th anniversary of liberating the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland even though a new Russian pavilion had opened there.
At their concluding news conference, Putin and Tusk agreed that the Russian goodwill gesture signified a turning point in bilateral relations. It appears, however, that the issue has not been removed from the political agenda.
Tusk cautioned that it should not be expected that everyone will make a similar assessment of the Katyn meeting. Putin set forth the Russian stance implying that humanitarian issues are the only factor hindering mutual understanding on the Katyn issue.
"We don't want to place the relatives of the deceased in an ambiguous situation," Putin said, hinting that Moscow's stance on the issue remained firm.
Gazeta.ru
...
Remember the Russian journalists that kept turning up dead for awhile?