Leaders visit crash site one year on

The presidents of Russia and Poland navigated swirling tensions yesterday as they visited the site of the air crash that killed the Polish president Lech Kaczynski and 95 others a year ago. Russia's Dmitry Medvedev hosted his Polish counterpart, Bronislaw Komorowski, in the western city of Smolensk, not far from where Mr Kaczynski's aircraft crashed in heavy fog on 10 April 2010.

Mr Kaczynski and Poland's military and political elite were en route to a memorial service for the 1940 massacre of 22,000 Poles by the Soviet secret police. A plaque inscribed in Polish and put at the crash site in November by relatives of the victims called the 1940 massacre a "genocide".

But a Polish delegation that visited the site on Saturday were outraged when they saw the plaque had been replaced with a dual-language one that omitted any reference to the massacre.