You’ve probably heard by now, but…
…were killed this morning in a plane crash.
What an unbelievable accident. This is something out of a Tom Clancy novel. As someone on another forum said, it’s maybe the equivalent of the POTUS and Joint Chiefs crashing their plane into Ground Zero on the anniversary of 9/11. Unreal. My condolences to all Polish citizens.
What are the implications for eastern Europe?
I’m very fond of Poland. I spent two years of my life there, those totally pivotal years ('90-'92) when Solidarity triumphed and democracy arrived.
I know how much Katyn means to them, and I’m sure many are suspicious that the Russians did this on purpose. There’s a harsh history between these 2 countries.
But I think Poland is strong enough to get through this. The people will be shocked, but then they’ll build their democratic government right back up.
Sad. Very sad.
I’m surprised they didn’t have rules about so many in the government traveling on the same plane…
‘Luckily’ for Poland, the President is primarily a ceremonial figure. The Prime Minister, who is actually the locus of political power, was not on the plane.
Poland will survive.
My condolences to all the Polish people. A terrible, terrible loss. The circumstances and the location certainly look suspicious, at first glance, but hopefully this will just turn out to have been a tragic accident.
This is exactly what I thought.
That’s insane.
Me too.
I also was going to send condolences to my one Polish friend, but I realized I’ve lost her email.
My condolences to Poland and to the families of the dead.
That said, this is going to be the most fertile ground for breeding conspiracy theories since 9/11, if not more so. That’s not going to be good. It’s especially sad as relations between Poland and Russia appeared to be on the mend recently.
I hope the Poles have a strategy to get an interim government in place and that everyone learns not to put all your government in a vulnerable position at once.
This is a very difficult accident to spin into a conspiracy theory. From what I understand, there was heavy fog, and the pilots had tried three times to land and had to go around because they couldn’t acquire the runway when they got to the decision point.
Unless Putin can create fog on demand, and then command the pilots to miss the runway a couple of times to make it look good then crash and kill themselves, this was an accident.
Does this mean that John Goodman will take over now?
Other than the President there weren’t any full members of the cabinet onboard; just a few deputy ministers. However most of Polands top military commanders where onboard; including the deputy minister of defence, the chief of the general staff, and the chiefs of the army, navy, & air force.
Not much. The PM survived and all the dead officials can be replaced.
In a democracy, no official is, or ought to be, irreplaceable. This is still a terrible tragedy for the people of Poland.
Duuude!! HAARP, man, the ruskies made their version first!!
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‘primarily a ceremonial figure’ sort of understates it though - the president is much more powerful than that esp. if the PM is of the same party. See a related thread here for some more discussion.
I really, truly hope not.
What would be the implications of THAT?! :eek:
On a more serious note, we are going to be fine. It would have been more difficult had the Prime Minister been there instead of the President.
The Poles are claiming that Russian-Polish relations will be better because of this crash, due to the way that the Russians have reacted. There’s no chance that this was a Russian caused crash: the Polish President has a history of forcing pilots to land planes against their judgement in the past, according to the BBC, and everybody on board surely wanted to land at Katyn, and not elsewhere.
It was a reference to the movie King Ralph :D.
Given today’s technology the conspiracy folks will wonder why an aircraft with heads of state can’t land in fog. A handheld GPS and a FLIR visual system (off the shelf technology) can put a low-time VFR pilot on the runway in an emergency. The plane was dumping fuel which means they over-fueled it for landing or there was a mechanical.
There is also a suggestion that President Lech Kaczynski may have pressured the pilot to land.