Polish Premier Plans Smolensk Visit 10 Years After Deadly Crash

(Bloomberg) -- Poland’s prime minister is seeking to go to the site of the 2010 plane crash that killed President Lech Kaczynski and dozens of officials in Smolensk, Russia, the first such visit since the disaster.

The event would mark a decade of strained relations with Russia, which has consistently refused to accommodate Polish demands to return the wreckage of the plane. It will also give the ruling Law & Justice party an opportunity to revisit a tragedy that helped lift it to power and transform Poland from one of Europe’s biggest successes into a renegade in less than a decade.

Foreign Minister Jacek Czaputowicz will meet his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, to discuss the visit, Blazej Spychalski, spokesman for President Andrzej Duda, said Thursday. He didn’t specify if Duda also intended to go.

Premier Mateusz Morawiecki plans to visit Smolensk and the Katyn forest, according to the head of his office, Michal Dworczyk. The latter site is where Soviet troops killed thousands of Polish officers during World War II in a massacre that continues to fuel tension between Warsaw and its Cold War master Moscow.

The visit may clash with efforts of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He’s inviting world leaders to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the World War II victory in May, but has cranked up rhetoric to against western powers that say the secret 1939 pact between Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler to carve up Poland and the Baltic States “paved the way“ for war.

Law & Justice may use the occasion to shore up support for Duda, who leads opinion polls before the May election and is widely expected to win a second five-year term. That would help his nationalist former party cement a controversial overhaul of the judiciary that has put the eastern European country on a collision course with the European Union.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the late president’s twin brother and chairman of the party, has nurtured a cult of conspiracy around the crash that became the galvanizing force for a movement that made him Poland’s most powerful man after elections in 2015.

To contact the reporter on this story: Marek Strzelecki in Warsaw at mstrzelecki1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Andrea Dudik at adudik@bloomberg.net, Michael Winfrey, Andrew Langley

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