Poland to release Smolensk disaster report

PM Tusk (left) with Minister Miller; photo - PAP/ Leszek Szymańsk

A press conference will take place at 10.00 CET, following which documents in Polish, Russian and English will be released.

The delegation had flown to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Katyn crime, which saw 22500 Poles slaughtered on Stalin's orders.

In spite of the fact that Miller, who led the investigation, labelled Russia's own official 2009 report as “incomplete”, members of Poland's opposition have already attacked the forthcoming Polish contribution.

Earlier this week, Antoni Macierewicz of the conservative Law and Justice party (PiS) lambasted the Polish report as “an attempt to confirm Russian propaganda.”

Macierewicz's party is led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who lost his twin brother Lech – then president of Poland – in the crash.

Reactions to the crash polarised Polish society, with tensions between PiS and Prime Minister Tusk's Civic Platform party exemplified in last year's Defenders of the Cross saga.

The aforementioned stand-off saw many PiS supporters rally to defend a cross that had been planted outside the president's residence, with conspiracy theories abounding about Russian involvement in the crash.

It is expected that Miller's report will point to errors on both the Polish and the Russia side.

At the beginning of the year, Miller was compelled to speak out regarding what he described as Russia's “incomplete” report.

The survey by Moscow's Interstate Aviation Commission (IAC) laid the blame on pilot error.

Miller stated that the Russians had failed to analyse the responses of their own air traffic controllers.

Nevertheless, leaks have suggested that much of the blame will be placed on Polish shoulders. A source has already claimed that as many as 150 Poles will be named as bearing some measure of responsibility for the disaster, including the pilots themselves as well as superiors in the air force, the army and at the Ministry of Defence. (nh/pg)