A true tragedy and a political crisis in Poland:

A plane carrying the Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, and dozens of the country’s top political and military leaders crashed in a heavy fog in western Russia on Saturday morning, killing everyone aboard.

Television showed chunks of flaming fuselage scattered in a bare forest near Smolensk, where the president was arriving for a ceremony commemorating the murder of more than 20,000 Polish officers by the Soviet secret police after the Red Army invaded Poland.

The irony, noted above, is that they were headed to Russia to commemorate the Katyn massacre. As former President Aleksander Kwasniewski told Polish TV today, “It is a damned place.” The leader of the lower house of Parliament now takes over as President, but must call elections within 60 days.

As you can see, a substantial chunk of the political class was on the plane:

Among those on board, according to the Web site of the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, were Mr. Kaczynski; his wife, Maria; former Polish president-in-exile Ryszard Kaczorowski; the deputy speaker of Poland’s parliament, Jerzy Szmajdzinski; the head of the president’s chancellery, Wladyslaw Stasiak; the head of the National Security Bureau, Aleksander Szczyglo; the deputy minister of foreign affairs, Andrzej Kremer; the chief of the general staff of the Polish army, Franciszek Gagor; the president of Poland’s national bank, Slawomir Skrzypek; the commissioner for civil rights protection, Janusz Kochanowski; the heads of all of Poland’s armed forces; and dozens of members of parliament.

Kaczynski has an identical twin brother who runs the conservative Law and Justice Party he represented as President and who used to serve as Prime Minister.

In a statement, President Obama called the loss “devastating.”