Kommersant (Moscow): "He was supposed to arrive at 10.30 a.m."
Polish President Lech Kaczynski dies in plane crash in Russia
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was appointed as the head of the government commission tasked with investigating the causes of the Tu-154 plane crash near Smolensk, which killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski, and taking care of its consequences. He spent Saturday night at the crash site. Kommersant special correspondent Andrei Kolesniov describes how Putin met with his Polish counterpart Donald Tusk, how he didn't meet Jaroslaw Kaczynski, and how the commission investigated the causes of the crash and took care of its consequences.
As we approached the Severny airfield, I scrutinised the ground from the air. Everything was burning. I couldn't understand how the plane's fragments could be scattered at such distances so far apart. But when the plane descended further, I realised it was the grass that was burning near Smolensk.
We were here four days ago when Putin and Tusk visited the Katyn forest to pay tribute to the memory of the Polish officers and soldiers who had been shot to death here so long ago. I learned that dozens of students (from the Smolensk Physical Fitness College) had been clearing the forest of snow to prepare for the guests' arrival. Apparently, they were so zealous that now the grass was burning.
But the grass was burning not only in the Katyn forest. When the plane was still several kilometres away, I saw tongues of flames licking the forest. I thought, "This is probably the way it should be. Let the forest burn if it is so cursed. Let it burn to the ground if it is so deadly in the direct sense of the word."
A Russian plane carrying Poland's political elite burned in this forest. They were flying to the area to honour the memory of the Poles who had been shot dead here by Russians 70 years ago.
We landed from the other side and I didn't see the crash site, but it was not far off – maybe 250-300 metres. I stood on the edge of the runway and peered at the people below. Steam, not smoke, rose up from the ground. It was perspiration.
Or maybe this was the evening fog similar to the morning fog that led to the crash.
A middle-aged Pole stood by the fence separating the military airfield from the barracks. He looked concerned. He seemed to be in a rush, although he didn't move. He looked to the skies as if expecting someone. I thought someone was due to arrive. We were also waiting for Putin. However, the prime minister was still in a meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart Mykola Azarov at the Vnukovo-2 Airport near Moscow and I understood that at best he would only arrive in a couple of hours.
I approached the Pole. He said he was a member of the Polish delegation and was meeting the Polish president's plane.
I felt sick.
"He was supposed to arrive at 10.30 a.m.", he said. "Then a solemn mass had been planned and later on meetings with the Polish diaspora ... I am in charge of one of them, by the way".
"You mean you were responsible for one of them, right?" I asked. "What meetings are you talking about? Have you been to the crash site?"
"Yes, I have, but I do not believe it", he said. "I understand he will not arrive. Do you think I am crazy? I simply can't think otherwise. I can't. My friends were on this plane. Poland's former ambassador to Dushanbe, who is now Kaczynski's personal interpreter, was also on this plane."
The man kept confusing the tenses.
"There was also a young woman", he said. "We were preparing the visit a week ago and worked a lot here. I liked speaking to her small daughter."
I didn't want to ask him anything else. I had already cursed myself for the questions I had asked.
"I must go, please forgive me," he said. "I have to take care of many things."
Then he walked several steps to the side and stopped still.
In half an hour we found ourselves in the part of the airport where the rescue operations were going on. "Rescue" would be the wrong word because nobody survived the crash, but the rescue teams were doing what they were supposed to do anyway. The Emergencies Ministry deployed a whole township to the airport. Dozens of lorries and trucks for all kinds of emergencies were standing nearby. Some rescue workers were unloading coffins while others were loading them onto the trucks.
People stood by the stretchers covered in the firemen's uniforms. They were so evenly spread over the stretchers that a shudder passed over me when I saw them from afar. The firemen were heading for a bite to eat. They were in no rush. They knew they had enough time to eat their army pot roast. They didn't have to return to this spot. The fire had been extinguished long ago. Emergencies Minister Sergei Shoigu said at the government commission's meeting that the fire was put out in nine minutes, and the first team on the crash site arrived a minute after the tragedy. I do not even know how this is humanly possible.
I could see the remnants of the plane through a crack in the wall. The site was close, about 100 metres away, but these were the hardest 100 metres to cross.
Senior officials in a big blue tent prepared for a meeting. I saw signs with the names of head of the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor's Office Alexander Bastrykin, Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev, Chief of Rosaviatsia (Federal Air Transport Agency) Alexander Neradko, Governor of the Smolensk Region Sergei Antufyev... But the tent was empty. The Russian prime minister's plane was about to land and everyone went outside.
Putin immediately went to the crash site. Several lorries carrying sand were unloaded to fill the hole in the ground. Everyone walked by without paying attention to the sand and the dust. The ground was moving beneath my feet. I felt like water, fire or maybe nothing at all was under me.
This feeling disappeared on the crash site. I felt the firm ground under my feet. It was against this ground that the plane crashed.
I had seen a televised picture of the crash, but it was not the same as seeing the crash in person. My impression from what I saw at the site was odd. The plane had hit the ground and split into parts. The chassis, nose and wings lay at an equal distance from the impact point. They were spread evenly, as if the plane had hoped to take off again, but this hope died instantly due to the distance separating the individual parts.
There was nothing at the impact point – only small fragments and pieces of cloth, but nothing else, as if the plane had fallen and broken into several even parts that could have been put back together again.
The sun was setting. It looked as though it was bleeding and fell below the horizon fast. However, it didn't become dark because the rescue workers put lighters made of cloth in several places. They were six metres high and had a metre in diametre. They were lit from within and looked like huge candles burning amidst the fragments so brightly that I thought clearly there was no need to wait for the mess – it had already started.
Putin stood by the fragments for a while, listening attentively to Shoigu and nodding several times. I think he was trying to understand what had happened right there on the spot. And it seemed like it should have been simple to understand what had happened. The plane started to land, but failed to reach the landing lights by about a hundred metres as if the pilots were trying to see them and probably had time to see them. I think they saw them.
Putin returned to the hole. He walked by the coffins lying on both sides. The rescue teams had not yet taken them away. The empty coffins were on the left, and the coffins with bodies were on the right. One coffin lay several metres from the others on a separate piece of tarpaulin. He tried not to notice them or the two bodies on stretchers covered by polyethylene. He didn't want others to think that he saw all this (and he did see all this). Apparently, he didn't want to interfere with the rescue teams doing their job. Maybe there was some other reason. In the meantime, they were doing their job and in a couple of minutes all 96 bodies were placed into coffins and the majority of them were gone.
Almost all the members of the government commission were waiting for Putin by the tent. As its chairman, Putin told them what should be done "to establish the causes of the tragedy and help the families of the dead as soon as possible."
Shoigu reported on the time of the crash, when fire lorries arrived and how quickly the fire was put out. He said the bodies were already being sent to Moscow for identification.
Levitin added that two on-board recorders had been found, but he decided not to touch them before the arrival of his Polish colleagues. He added that the visibility in the area of the military airport should be no less than 1,000 metres.
"Was it 1,000 metres?" the prime minister asked.
"No more than 400 metres," Levitin replied. "This is the highest figure. The pilots made a decision to land themselves."
In other words, they didn't listen to what they had been told from the ground. But this does not mean that they didn't listen to what they might have been told in the plane. The delegation was heading to attend a memorable event. More than 500 people were waiting for them and they could not afford to be late.
Neradko reported that the plane first touched "the top of a tree at a height of about eight metres." He specified that at that time the plane should have been flying at a height of 60 metres.
"It continued colliding with separate trees and started falling apart", he said. "Then it fell on the ground and caught fire."
"The crew was offered to circle the area once more and then go to an alternate airport," Bastrykin added.
Putin turned to Georgy Poltavchenko, the presidential envoy in the Central Federal District.
"You headed the Russian delegation at the airport," he said. "You were an eyewitness to the tragedy. You must have seen it all. What did you see?"
"Yes, I was there with the governor," Poltavchenko replied. "At 10.30 a.m. (20 minutes before the crash) the head traffic controller approached us and said that the situation was complicated."
"At 10.30 a.m.?" Putin asked again.
"Exactly", Poltavchenko answered. He added that because of the fog, the visibility was not even 400 metres, but about 130 metres or even 100 metres. He said he asked the crew to fly to Vitebsk or Minsk. The crew said they would circle around the airport once again because they still had a lot of fuel. Then..." The envoy stumbled.
"We didn't even hear the noise and the sound of the impact was strange, sort of hollow," he said. "We could not believe it."
"Have you been there?" Putin asked.
"We were there within three minutes," Poltavchenko explained. "We went by car to the end of the runway and it was just a bit further away. But there was nobody left alive." He looked up at the prime minister.
It was around 10 p.m. Tusk was about to arrive. He landed in Vitebsk and approached Smolensk by car. Just several days before, he and Putin had landed at the same airport on the same glide path. He didn't want to follow the same path. One Pole told me at the airport that Tusk was not afraid, but didn't want to do disrespect to the memory of the dead.
Probably, Tusk thought that now that he was responsible for Poland, which had lost its president, it was inappropriate to land at the same airport where 96 Poles had failed to land in the morning.
Three journalists were waiting for the Polish prime minister – Kaczynski's cameramen, his personal photographer and their coordinator. All three travelled to Smolensk by train although they usually accompanied the president. This time, too many dignitaries had chosen to fly on the ill-starred plane and they were asked to go by train.
"We travelled well", one of them told me. "We had a nice compartment. We didn't even notice that we spent the whole night on the train. We were not even upset that we didn't go by plane."
Tusk's cortege approached. Many people gathered by the tent. Men and women with tears in their eyes drove up and approached holding flowers and wreaths. Some embraced the cameraman and photographer, not being able to hold back their tears. Others hugged the Polish ambassador who was supposed to fly on the plane. He was even listed among the dead by mistake. Many of them had arrived several days before to prepare for the Polish prime minister's visit to Katyn.
I imagined how they first flew from Warsaw and then covered these 150 kilometres from Vitebsk... Every second they prepared themselves for looking at the airport and the crash site, but almost no one could cope with what they saw.
Putin and Tusk walked together into the blue tent. Kaczynski's twin brother Jaroslaw was also supposed to arrive – probably even together with Tusk. But it turned out that he decided to travel separately. The Kaczynski brothers had a complicated relationship with both Tusk and Putin. On that day, their relations went to the foreground instead of receding into the background.
Jaroslaw Kaczynski was travelling on his own. When Tusk and Putin contacted him to say they would not go to the crash site without him (he was half an hour away from Smolensk), he replied that he would like to visit the site alone, with a priest who was accompanying him.
No doubt, he had every right to do this.
Putin and Tusk approached the crash site. The giant candles were still burning. They trembled in the wind and made the people's hearts tremble. A bewildered Tusk stood at the impact point. He listened to Shoigu's and Putin's explanations, but I think he could hardly hear anything. Perplexed, he looked around him, as if he could not understand how a plane with so many people could turn into what was left. He nodded weakly. When he was given a huge bouquet, he paused for a moment, as if unsure where to lay it.
It seemed to me he could put it anywhere. Any place within half a mile radius would do. Every centimetre was showered with flowers – it was not possible to make a mistake.
Tusk and Putin left flowers on a section of the wing. The Polish prime minister sat down with his hands on the wing for a long time with tears streaming down his face.
I didn't see who embraced whom first, but I saw them standing, holding their arms around each other. And I recalled the news conference here in Smolensk several days before and their farewell handshake. An eternity had passed from that handshake to this embrace.
Then they headed back to the tent. Tusk suddenly turned his head to the right where the rescue workers stood by the coffins. He faultlessly approached the one that was standing aside. He asked Putin about something and Putin nodded. Tusk stood for several more minutes at Kaczynski's coffin.
The identification procedures had yet to take place, but everything was clear. The man could not have been confused with anyone but his brother, who was now travelling from Vitebsk with a priest to the crash site.
But the president's body had to be officially identified. The coffin also had to go to Moscow, but his brother had not yet arrived and 42 more bodies would have to be delayed. They were all supposed to be delivered to Moscow on one plane. The identification procedure was scheduled for 11 a.m. The relatives of the dead were already flying to Moscow.
Tusk and Putin returned to the tent where members of the government commission were waiting for them. They repeated to the Polish prime minister what they told Putin an hour and a half ago.
In the meantime, Jaroslaw Kaczynski arrived at the airport. He didn't go to the tent although he knew he was expected there. He went by car directly to the area.
His attitude towards the Russian and Polish prime ministers was the same after his brother's death. He didn't want to meet with them – just his brother.
He headed to the hole with a priest and several other people and asked not to be disturbed by anyone.
Officials in the tent were deciding how to conduct the identification procedure. Would all relatives go together or one by one? What should be done with the people who would have to fly to Moscow independently? How should their return flights be booked and on what planes? There were numerous details and they had to be accommodated right on the spot.
In about 40 minutes, I saw eight or ten people carry a coffin from the area and carefully place it into a lorry. Jaroslaw Kaczynski's car left several minutes later. I sensed that something had changed.
He said he identified his brother's body and there would be no other legally registered procedures. No one argued that. They decided that the Polish supreme commander should leave Russia with all the honours.
Putin was organising the farewell for almost another three hours. It was scheduled for the following day. Putin talked to Defence Minister Anatoly Serdyukov and many other people, From time to time he went to the Emergencies Ministry headquarters – a big cabin on wheels – and talked via a TV link with Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov and Healthcare and Social Development Minister Tatyana Golikova. Sometimes he would stand there with his back to the entrance for five or six minutes. Tusk had already left.
It was later than 2 a.m. Putin said he would again come to Smolensk to take part in the official ceremony on the following day. He did what he promised.
I visited the crash site again that night. I do not know why I didn't notice this before. A completely unscathed birch tree stood right in the epicentre amidst the heaps of twisted wreckage and fallen trees over dozens of metres around it. It was the only one to survive. Maybe, there is no need for another monument.
Andrei Kolesniov