It starts with an eight o’clock morning Mass at the 17th century baroque Carmelite Church, located next to the Presidential Palace in the heart of Warsaw, to commemorate the tragic death of his twin brother in a plane crash in Russia’s city of Smolensk on April 10, 2010.
The presidential delegation with Lech Kaczyński and 95 top politicians and military elite on board was on its way to attend the anniversary of the 1940 massacre of thousands of Polish officers by Josef Stalin's secret police during World War II in Katyn forest, near Smolensk.
In the evening Jarosław Kaczyński, surrounded by top ministers and hundreds of mostly pensioners holding birch crosses and framed pictures of his twin brother and his wife, attends a second Mass followed by a Rosary procession to the Presidential Palace where he climbs up a small stepladder to give an emotional speech.
Police block the surrounding streets to ensure the event can pass without interruption.
Victims of the disaster have been honoured alongside World War II heroes in speeches and on monuments. Every month for years, Kaczyński assured the crowd that he would soon be able to reveal the truth behind the presidential plane crash and pledged that those responsible would be held accountable.
The theories
Two official investigations conducted by both Russia and Poland — under its previous Civic Platform government — concluded that the catastrophe was an accident caused by pilot errors attempting to land the Soviet-era Tupolev Tu-154 plane at an airfield covered in heavy fog that lowered the visibility below the minimum required standard.
Additionally, the Polish commission blamed the Russian air traffic controllers for providing pilots with incorrect landing instructions, which made them believe that they were on the right course to land.
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