First, a tragedy that almost sinks beneath the weight of a huge historical coincidence. A plane carrying the political and military elite of today's Polish society crashes, killing everybody aboard, while bringing them to Katyn forest to commemorate the murder of a previous generation of the same elite by Stalin's secret police in 1940.
Then the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, whose early career was spent in a later, tamer version of that same secret police force, does something remarkable. He tells one of the main Russian TV channels to show Polish director Andrzej Wajda's 2007 film "Katyn" in prime time. It's more than an apology. It's a national act of penance.
And after that, the speculation starts about whether this tragedy might be the way that the two great Slavic nations, Russians and Poles, are finally reconciled.