Translated material
“Misfortune brought us closer”
The Poles were touched by the sympathy of the Russians
Today, at the presidential palace in Warsaw, a farewell ceremony will begin for the head of state, Lech Kaczynski, and his wife Maria. They died in a Polish plane crash on Saturday near Smolensk. The president was brought home on Sunday, and he was one of the first to be identified. Yesterday a message was received from Moscow that the body of the president’s wife had also been identified; today it will be delivered to Warsaw. The presidential couple will not be separated - a common farewell ceremony has been organized for them.A meeting of government and presidential administration representatives took place yesterday at the residence of Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. The talk was about helping the families of the victims of the disaster and organizing the funeral of the presidential couple. The decision on the burial place will be made primarily by the Kaczynski family. A public farewell to the presidential couple is scheduled to take place on Saturday, April 17, at Pilsudski Square in Warsaw near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The funeral ceremony will be dedicated to all those who died in the disaster.
“The exact date of the funeral will be announced when the bodies of all those killed in the plane crash are delivered to Poland from Russia,” said Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration Jacek Sasin. “If they can be delivered by midweek, the funeral can be held on Saturday.” In total, 96 people died near Smolensk, most of them high-ranking officials who held important government and public positions. Among the victims of the tragedy was the head of protocol of the Polish Foreign Ministry, Mariusz Kazana. Now his predecessor, now the Polish Ambassador to France, who is urgently recalled from Paris, will take over the ceremony of an unprecedented state funeral.
Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev had expressed his readiness to come to the funeral. President of the European Council Herman van Rompuy and President of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso also expressed their desire to attend the funeral. President Horst Köhler and Chancellor Angela Merkel will arrive from Germany, and President Dalia Grybauskaite from Lithuania. The Polish Foreign Ministry does not rule out the arrival of US President Barack Obama. “I expect that the whole world will come to Warsaw,” noted Minister Sikorski.
“The Russian side behaves with Slavic openness and cordiality,” the head of Polish diplomacy emphasized. According to Mr. Sikorski, we can talk about a change in Polish-Russian relations: “I don’t know whether there will be a political turning point, but an emotional turning point is obvious. And this is already a lot. Because people make decisions about the future of the relationship." Every Pole today knows that the Russians sincerely shared the enormous Polish grief. Newspapers are full of friendly materials from Russia, television is reporting from Moscow and Smolensk. People were touched when Alexandrov's ensemble, beloved by the Poles, performed a mourning song near the walls of the Polish Embassy in Moscow.
The Poles took to heart the appeals of Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin to them. It is often recalled here that the Russian Prime Minister visited the Katyn land three times in four days, where the Polish officers shot in 1940 by the Soviet NKVD are buried. First, on April 7, together with his Polish colleague Donald Tusk, he took part in a funeral ceremony at the Katyn memorial complex. On April 10, Putin and Tusk met at the site of the crash of the presidential plane. On April 11, Putin personally held the coffin with the body of the Polish president in Smolensk with honors.
“Misfortune has brought us closer,” the speaker of the upper house of the Polish parliament, Marshal of the Senate Bogdan Borusevich told Vremya Novostey. “The tragedy near Smolensk will affect the development of Polish-Russian relations. They will become more open and trusting,” our interlocutor noted. (An interview with a famous Polish politician will be published in tomorrow’s issue of VN.)
The speaker of the lower house of parliament, Marshal of the Sejm Bronislaw Komorowski, who took over the duties of president after the death of Lech Kaczynski, has already taken up the task of solving personnel problems. Among the dead were many people who held key positions in the state, including those related to the security of the country. The first priority was to find new leadership for the national bank and military. The duties of head of the presidential chancellery are entrusted to Jacek Michalowski. The head of the National Security Bureau will be appointed today. This will be General Stanislaw Kozei, who served as Deputy Minister of Defense in the government of Jaroslaw Kaczynski. In the past, General Kozei studied at the Soviet military academy.