A crowd in Warsaw mourns the tragedy Saturday afternoon.

VILNIUS — Just two days after his official state visit in Vilnius, Polish President Lech Kaczyński was killed Saturday morning in a plane crash near Smolensk that claimed the lives of 97 people, according to Russia’s Ministry of Emergency Situations.

In addition to the president, Poland’s 88-member state delegation was on-board, which included the first lady, army chief of staff, central bank governor, Office for National Security chief, air force and navy commanders, several members of parliament and other government officials. All are confirmed dead.

“We still cannot fully understand the scope of this tragedy and what it means for us in the future. Nothing like this has ever happened in Poland,” Piotr Paszkowski, Polish foreign ministry spokesman told the press Saturday.

Heavy fog is being blamed as the cause of the accident, as the pilot accidentally steered the plane into trees obscured by mist at 10:56 a.m. just short of the Smolensk military airport runway. Mechanical error has been ruled out as a cause by authorities, as the presidential plane had been regularly maintained.

The pilot had been told that landing in Minsk would be safer, but chose to attempt a Smolensk landing anyway. President Dmitry Medvedev ordered the establishment of a government commission headed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to investigate all the circumstances of the disaster.

The plane was a Tupolev Tu-154, designed in the 1960s by the Soviet Union. The plane remains a common fixture on Eastern European and Asian airfleets. According to the Aviation Safety Network Tu-154s have been involved in eight fatal accidents over the past 10 years.

The Polish delegation was flying to Russia to commemorate the 1940 Katyn massacre — the joint commemoration by Polish and Russian officials was seen as a warming of relations between the two countries. In the massacre about 22,000 captured Polish military officers were executed by the Soviet Union near the village of Katyn, located on the Russian-Belarusian border.

“This is unbelievable — this tragic, cursed Katyn,” former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski told the TVN24 network. “A cursed place, horrible symbolism … it’s hard to believe. You get chills down your spine.”

No Baltic government officials were on-board, and the Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian heads of state sent condolences to Poland.

“I am personally shocked, because only the day before yesterday President Kaczyński and I met in Vilnius. Lithuania has lost a good friend. The Kaczyński era was one of the most significant stages of our nations’ cooperation,” Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaitė said.

Grybauskaitė and Kaczyński had agreed Thursday to increase energy ties between the two countries while Grybauskaitė promised to work on allowing the use of Polish letters on Lithuanian state documents, something that has caused friction for several years.

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