Russia Blames Intoxicated Polish Official for Air Crash that Killed President

The committee investigating last April’s air disaster says that a drunk polish general pressured the pilot to land.

This is not going to improve relations between the two countries. Polish president Lech Kaczynski and 95 others, many of them Polish officials, were killed in a Russian plane crash on April 20, 2010, and while many have questioned the conduct of Russian air traffic controllers in the incident, the official report out of Moscow has placed the blame on a Polish general. Gen. Andrzej Blasik was in the cockpit at the time, and the report found he pressured the pilot to attempt to land in adverse conditions. Blasik allegedly had been drinking. The Polish delegation was on its way to Russia for a reconciliation mission after Moscow officially acknowledged the Soviet role in the massacre of Poles in 1940.