Remains of nine Red Army soldiers discovered near Vitebsk

September 13, Vitebsk / Sergey Kochetov - BELTA /. The remains of nine Red Army soldiers were discovered today in the area of the village of Noviki, Vitebsk district. This was reported to a BELTA correspondent by the company commander of the 52nd Separate Specialized Search Battalion, Ivan Tetushkin.

The remains of the servicemen were accidentally found by searchers while defusing explosive devices discovered during fieldwork in the territory of the Shpachechinsky village council. Directly under the ammunition cache, remains were found, which were preliminarily identified thanks to fragments of clothing and uniforms. Currently, specialists are completing the extraction of the remains from the ground, after which they will be handed over to local authorities for reburial and perpetuation of the memory of the fallen, noted Ivan Tetushkin.

Field search operations near Vitebsk were organized as part of the international "Watch of Memory of the CIS Countries-2011", in which the 52nd Separate Specialized Search Battalion of the Ministry of Defense of Belarus and activists of the search movement from Belarus and Russia are participating. The operations are organized in the Vitebsk district, where during the war, from the autumn of 1943 to the summer of 1944, over 42,000 Soviet servicemen died in battles for the liberation of Vitebsk. Following the ten-day "Watch of Memory", it is planned to hold a solemn reburial ceremony for the found remains in one of the mass graves in the Vitebsk district.-0-