Conspiracy theories are a factor in May election

Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the identical twin brother of the late Polish president Lech Kaczynski, is fighting to win the May 10 presidential election against Civic Platform’s Bronislaw Komorowski, the incumbent.

Kaczynski has consistently said the crash wasn’t an accident — even after both Russian and Polish investigators concluded poor weather and the pilots were to blame. Kaczynski believes his brother and the officials were assassinated by the Russians.

Polls show nearly one-third of Poles shared the same belief.

If this sounds paranoid, one must remember the context and the deep symbolism of the plane crash, said Randall Hansen, of the Munk Centre of Global Affairs.

The Katyn Massacre left an indelible impression on the Polish people, he said. "It was not only the murder of officers but rather it was an attempt to eliminate an entire military elite and it should be understood in the context of the joint Soviet-German invasion of Poland and a key element was the liquidation of the intelligentsia. If you destroy them, you destroy the Jews as well, and you destroy the Polish nation.

“Poland, fairly uniquely if not entirely among European nations, is one that was crushed, carved up, divided and disappeared ... I think that creates this understandable hyper-Polish sensitivity that expresses itself to a certain degree of pardonable paranoia.”

And currently, Russian aggression is a constant, looming threat.

“The aggression is very real and Poles have a real reason to be worried. That makes it all the more sensitive,” Hansen said. "Russia is chiefly to blame here in the sense they are organizing military exercises near the border, what they have done to Crimea, to eastern Ukraine ... They are trying to make Europeans, above all Eastern Europeans, worried. It is working.” Tanya Talaga