This morning’s horrific plane crash that killed Polish president Kaczynski his wife and many senior staff en route to Katyn forest contained some tragic irony.
Not least that, curiously for a president famous for his anti-Russian sentiments, Kaczynski insisted on continuing to use a safe but ageing Soviet jet for his official travels, long after even Russia and China had phased out the Tu-154.
Or that such bloodshed could come at the end of a long diplomatic dance to finally heal Polish-Russian relations over the Katyn Massacre.
But Russia must be extra careful to prevent one other irony from coming into fruition: the “supreme irony if the result of today’s tragedy would be to deepen the mistrust engendered by the original Soviet massacre which Lech Kaczynski was flying to commemorate’, as Krzysztof Bobinski writes in the BBC.
To prevent this, Russia must ensure that the investigation into the crash is as transparent and thorough as possible.
Unfortunately, Russia has tended to do the exact opposite in such situations, such as the terrible way it handled the Kursk disaster. But even when it has facts on its side it ends up looking guilty through equivocation and secrecy- like during the KAL 007 aftermath.
Repeating those experiences would be the absolute worst thing Russia could do now: considering the tense Russian-Polish relations and the already proliferating conspiracy theories, it might threaten to invite comparisons with Mozambique and Rwanda.
The lie of Katyn Forest – that it was Nazis and not Soviets who killed the Polish officers – underpinned a false friendship between the USSR and Poland. It would be a shame if the plane crash would now lay a false groundwork for enimity between them.