ATCWatcher - in my previous post I referred to "M" or "S" designator in the flightplan - "M" standing for State/Military. Of course, most of the flight (EPWA TWR and APP, Polish, Belarussian and Russian ACC) was conducted as a GAT flight. Controllers in Smolensk were not certified according to ICAO requirements, so we could treat it as OAT. But as was stressed many times before the release of the report, and was reiterated in it, it doesn't really matter - according to Russian rules, they can issue "commands" only to Russian a/c on domestic flight or military. So just because PLF was military/state, and was flying according to OAT rules it didn't mean ATC could "command" it to go around or divert. And add to it the fact that as the report states, Yak's crew disregarded instructions from ATC, and it seems Tupolevs crew were doing the same.
And may the Polish Air Force learn the lessons this time.
I highly doubt that unfortunately. Politicians on both sides are preoccupied with how to slander the Russian report, most of them without even reading it. Minister of Defence, who should be directly responsible for how things are run in military, during the TV interview first said "yes, they shouldn't have tried the approach, but that's NOT what caused the crash" - and then quoted some unimportant mistakes from the report. Then he produced some papers saying that his subordinates assured him after Casa's crash that NOW everything would be ok and it wouldn't happen again... That's how things are run here, and level of debate is pathetically low. Sorry for this excursion, but I think it's somewhat relevant to the case. I hope we don't have another similar topic soon (remember, apart from Casa and Tu, we had smaller Antonov 28 and Mi 8 helicopter crashes in last 3 years due to similar reasons).