More than 16 years after the Smolensk disaster, Russia continues to withhold the presidential Tu-154m wreckage while the current Polish government has made only one recent attempt to recover it. <\/p>\n
More than 16 years have passed since the Smolensk disaster, and the wreckage of the presidential Tupolev remains in Russia. Moscow refuses to return it, claiming it is vital evidence in the ongoing investigation into the circumstances of the crash. Previous reports indicated the machine’s remains were at the Smolensk-North military airfield, but even that is no longer certain.<\/p>\n
“We are not allowed into this place. The entire area is fenced off in such a way that if the wreckage is where it used to be, it is invisible from the places to which we have access,” Polish Ambassador to Russia Krzysztof Krajewski said in April in an interview with RMF FM.<\/p>\n
According to our findings, the current leadership of the ministry, headed by Rados\u0142aw Sikorski, has made one attempt to recover the wreckage since December 2023, shortly after the PO-PSL-New Left-Third Way coalition took power.<\/p>\n
“In the first quarter of 2024, another demand for the return of the wreckage was sent to the Russian side. The diplomatic note on this matter remained unanswered,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs informed Gazeta.pl.<\/p>\n
The current political and military situation in relations with Russia is also significant. In 2022, Russia launched a full-scale attack on Ukraine, simultaneously waging a hybrid war and committing provocations against Poland and other NATO countries. In recent years, Poland and Russia have mutually closed their consulates general.<\/p>\n
Between 2019 and 2023, during the second term of the Law and Justice (PiS) government, a total of eight diplomatic notes concerning the return of the Tupolev wreckage were sent. The Russians responded to only one. As the MFA informs us, Moscow then presented “the position, unchanged since the disaster, that the wreckage of the presidential plane cannot be returned because it constitutes physical evidence in criminal proceedings.”<\/p>\n
“The issue of the return of the wreckage was also raised in 2021 during talks between the Polish Ambassador in Moscow and the leadership of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, as well as in talks with the leadership of the appropriate territorial department of the MFA of the Russian Federation. In these talks, the Russian side invariably maintained its previous position,” the ministry conveyed to us.<\/p>\n
Actions regarding the return of the machine’s remains were significantly more frequent in the first years after the disaster. As reported in Gazeta.pl, the MFA under the PO-PSL government demanded this in letters from September 2010, April 2011, October 2011, May 2012, April 2013, January, April, July, and August 2015. In some notes, the ministry also sought to agree with the Russian side on the technical conditions for returning the wreckage.<\/p>\n
In March 2012, Minister of Foreign Affairs Rados\u0142aw Sikorski sent a letter to the head of Russian diplomacy summarizing Polish efforts to recover the wreckage. The topic was also raised during talks with Russian politicians and officials in February, April, December 2011, January, June, July, December 2012, December 2013, October 2014, and February 2015.<\/p>\n
After the PO-PSL coalition lost the 2015 elections, Law and Justice took over the matter. As then-Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Jan Dziedziczak reported in response to an interpellation in 2017, the MFA under the right-wing government also raised this topic in direct contacts with Russia in December 2015, January, February, April, July, September 2016, and January 2017.<\/p>\n
In 2018, Polish diplomats handed a note to representatives of states and organizations requesting support in efforts to obtain the wreckage from the Russians. In the same year, the MFA also sent a note directly to the Russians.<\/p>\n
“We have repeatedly pointed out the lack of grounds for further holding the wreckage of the Tu-154 airplane and the black boxes. They are the property of Poland, and their return is not only a legal obligation, but also a moral one,” said Foreign Minister Jacek Czaputowicz in the Sejm in March 2018.<\/p>\n
The presidential Tu-154m disaster on April 10, 2010, claimed the lives of 96 people, including presidential couple Lech and Maria Kaczy\u0144ski. The Polish commission chaired by Jerzy Miller, investigating the causes of the disaster, was appointed a few days later by the Ministry of National Defense. It included 34 experts from various fields, including civil and military pilots, aviation lawyers, and meteorologists.<\/p>\n
At the end of July 2011, the commission issued a report stating that the direct cause of the disaster was descending below the minimum descent altitude (100 meters) at an excessive rate of descent, under atmospheric conditions that made visual contact with the ground impossible. The initiation of the go-around procedure\u2014aborting the landing when it was known that the landing could end in failure\u2014was delayed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
More than 16 years after the Smolensk disaster, Russia continues to withhold the presidential Tu-154m wreckage while the current Polish government has made only one recent attempt to recover it. The Status of the Presidential Wreckage in Russia More than 16 years have passed since the Smolensk disaster, and the wreckage of the presidential Tupolev […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpai_generated_summary":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics-and-law"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bizonews.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bizonews.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bizonews.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bizonews.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bizonews.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18514"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bizonews.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18514\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bizonews.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bizonews.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bizonews.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}