WARSAW — A plane carrying the Polish president and dozens of the country’s top political and military leaders to the site of a Soviet massacre of Polish officers in World War II crashed in western Russia on Saturday, killing everyone on board.

President Lech Kaczynski’s plane tried to land in a thick fog, missing the runway and snagging treetops about a half mile from the airport in Smolensk, scattering chunks of fuselage across a bare forest.

The crash came as a stunning blow to Poland, wiping out a large portion of the country’s leadership in one fiery explosion. And in a chilling twist, it happened at the moment that Russia and Poland were beginning to come to terms with the killing of more than 20,000 members of Poland’s elite officer corps in the same place 70 years ago.

“It is a damned place,” former President Aleksander Kwasniew- ski told TVN24. “It sends shivers down my spine.

“This is a wound which will be very difficult to heal,” he said.

A top Russian military official said air traffic controllers at the Smolensk airport had several times ordered the crew of the plane not to land, warned that it was descending below the glide path, and recommended it reroute to another airport.

“Nevertheless, the crew continued the descent,” said Lt. Gen. Aleksandr Alyoshin, the first deputy chief of the Russian air force staff. “Unfortunately, the result was tragic.”

Russian emergency officials said 97 people were killed. They included Poland’s deputy foreign minister and a dozen members of parliament, the chiefs of the army and the navy, and the president of the national bank. They included Anna Walentynowicz, 80, the former dock worker whose firing in 1980 set off the Solidarity strike that ultimately overthrew Polish Communism, as well as relatives of victims of the massacre that they were on their way to commemorate.

Poles united in their grief in a way that recalled the death of the Polish pope, John Paul II, five years ago. Thousands massed outside the Presidential Palace, laying flowers and lighting candles.

Magda Niemczyk, a 24-year-old student, held a single tulip. “I wanted to be together with the other Polish people,” she said.

“It’s a national tragedy,” said Ryszard Figurski, 70, a retired telecommunications worker. “Apart from their official positions, it is also simply the loss of so many lives.”

Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, one of the highest-ranking Polish leaders not on board the plane, told Radio Zet in Poland that he was the one to inform Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who “was in tears when he heard about the catastrophe.”

The crash happened days after Prime Minister Vladimir Putin became the first Russian leader to join Polish officials in commemorating the 1940 massacre at Katyn Woods, a wound that has festered between the two countries for decades and to Poles was a symbol of Russian domination.

Former President Lech Walesa, who presided over Poland’s transition from Communism, called the crash “the second disaster after Katyn.”

“They wanted to cut off our head there, and here the flower of our nation has also perished,” he said.

The repercussions on Poland’s coming presidential elections were far from clear. The Law and Justice Party lost numerous important leaders in addition to the president, including its parliamentary leader.

Under Poland’s Constitution, the leader of the lower house of parliament, now acting president, has 14 days to announce new elections, which must then take place within 60 days.

World leaders, especially Merkel, express sadness

BERLIN — World leaders expressed sadness on Saturday after an airplane crash in Russia killed Poland President Lech Kaczynski and some of his country’s leading military, banking and foreign policy experts.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev was one of the first to offer condolences and immediately called for an investigation into the cause of the crash, which occurred in dense fog close to Smolensk and not far from the Katyn Woods, where Kaczynski was due to commemorate the 1940 massacre of thousands of Polish officers and top civil servants by Joseph Stalin’s secret police.

“With deep and sad feelings we express our sympathy, as do all Russian people,” Medvedev said.

The tributes were particularly numerous and heartfelt from Germany, which has sought a stable and warm relationship with Poland despite centuries of mistrust, war and occupation.

“I am so deeply upset by the accident and the death of the Polish president,” Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel said.

She said she had sent a letter of condolence to Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister. “Germany stands by your side in this difficult moment,” Merkel added.

A U.S. State Department spokesman, P.J. Crowley, called the deaths a “terrible tragedy for Poland.”

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the whole world would be affected by the tragedy. “We know the hardships which Poland has endured,” Brown said in a statement. He also praised Kaczynski’s unswerving support for a free and independent Poland. Even though Kaczynski was often a difficult partner for Germany, Merkel made it one of her foreign policy priorities to improve relations with Poland once her conservative Christian Democrats were elected into power during the fall of 2005.

Her predecessor, the Social Democrat Gerhard Schroder, had upset the country by forging a special relationship with the Kremlin.

Once in power, Merkel worked hard to improve relations with President Kaczynski and his identical twin brother, Jaroslaw, who was also swept into power as prime minister of the Law and Justice conservative-nationalist party in late 2005 at the time of his brother’s election.

— New York Times News Service