Real Reason for death of Polish president Kaczynski in Smolensk Russia: Scent of Polish Shale gas a threat to Russia

Since the tragic death of Polish president Lech Kaczynski last month, along with the entire planeload of his accompanying dignitaries, who were  heading to Smolinsk Russia to commemorate the Russian massacre of Polish officers in Katyn forest in 1940 during World War 2, the chat on the internet  and many Polish people have claimed that this event wasn't a random accident, but a cleverly orchestrated assassination, secretly planned by Russia.

What is less clear and has gotten little speculation and  media attention is why would Russia attempt such an assassination attempt on such a grand scale and what was so threatening to Russian security to even contemplate this?

Surprisingly, several Russian English-language papers offer one plausible scenario....the start of Shale gas drilling by American gas concerns in Poland could in the future severely disrupt and outflank Russian gas flow  to the EU.

Russia has already been running this "disruption strategy" with Ukraine for the past 60 years so why not Poland?

Why does Russian want to despirately  control Ukrainian aging rusting gas pipelines, when it already has down-stream control of Ukrainian oil refineries? So that Ukraine can't develop it's own oil and gas industry, which was flourishing 100 years ago in Western Ukraine in places like Drohobych and Dashava, but was allowed to become obsolete up until the dieing days of the Soviet Union. Ukraine used to be totally energy independent but is now totally reliant on Russia. Most people don't realise that it was Ukrainian  engineers and oil and gas experts that built Gasprom and the Siberian gas capability and not Russians. The current stalemate with the demarcation of the Black Sea and Azov Sea has more to do with undersea shale gas and the 200 mile offshore exploration and mining rights then with settling boarder issues bewteen Russia and Ukraine.

Scent of Shale Gas Hangs Over Katyn

By Yulia Latynina

During Putin’s rule, Katyn has become the main obstacle in Russian-Polish relations.

In 2006, relatives of the Polish officers killed in the Katyn massacre of 1940 filed a lawsuit to force the Russian government to release its archives on the tragedy, but the prosecutor general rejected the case. In 2008, Moscow’s Khamovnichesky District Court threw out the same request, as did the Supreme Court in a 2009 ruling.

At the same time, the Kremlin-controlled media went on the offensive on two fronts. Russian readers were told that, first, it was the Germans who actually shot the Polish officers and, second, that the Katyn shootings were revenge for Red Army soldiers who had been killed in prisoner-of-war camps following the war with the “White Poles.”

An interview with historian Natalya Narochnitskaya published in Komsomolskaya Pravda just before Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s August visit to Poland caused a big scandal in Poland by suggesting that Polish prisoner-of-war camps served as a prototype for German concentration camps.

Then it all ended unexpectedly, as if on cue. Putin traveled last week to Katyn along with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk.

What caused such a dramatic shift?

The Wall Street Journal on April 8 reveals the answer. According to the article, “U.S. [energy] giants will start drilling for shale gas in Poland within the next few weeks.”

There’s your answer. All of Russia’s neo-imperialism has been built upon the fact that it has “peaceful gas” (similar to the Soviet Union’s “peaceful atom”) and that it can shove its gas pipelines through Poland just like the Kremlin did with Ukraine. But what if Poland becomes a shale gas exporter?

The Kremlin realized that the question of how much shale gas Poland extracts will depend on which political party wins the next elections there. One option: the party of late Polish President Lech Kaczynski. He was an ardent anti-Communist and a man who experienced deep personal pain over the Katyn massacre. Kaczynski made a point of attending commemorations at the site every year.

The other option is the party of Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a pragmatist who is ready to be friends with everyone, except Kaczynski — the two refused to even speak to each other.

And then the two prime ministers — Putin and Tusk — met at Katyn. They especially came in advance so as not to invite Kaczynski and to outflank him.

Three days later, Kaczynski — the unpopular, bad-tempered and despondent man whom opinion polls indicated would lose his re-election bid to any other contender  — flew to Smolensk. He took the entire Polish elite with him in hopes that his personal visit would outdo the pre-emptive showing by the archrival Tusk and the despised Putin.

And when he was told that dense fog shrouded the area and that flight controllers were attempting to reroute the airplane to an alternate airport, it was undoubtedly Kaczynski who gave the command to land anyway, suspecting that the fog was just a political ruse instigated by Putin to disrupt Kaczynski’s participation in the Katyn ceremony.

Putin and Tusk landed at the same airport three days before the crash to participate in their own commemoration ceremonies. For their arrival, special navigation equipment was brought to the Smolensk airport to provide additional safety. It is possible that this equipment was removed before Kaczynski’s plane landed. That would add even more fog to the mysterious crash.

Yulia Latynina hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio

One of several Russian sources: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/scent-of-shale-gas-hangs-over-katyn/403877.