Military parade marking 75th anniversary of Leningrad siege held on Palace Square

Pilots from the Swifts aerobatic team consisting of six MiG-29 fighter jets wrapped up a military parade on St. Petersburg’s Palace Square marking the 75th anniversary since the liberation of the city from a Nazi siege, TASS reported.

More than 2,500 troops, security forces and also nearly 80 pieces of special equipment took part in the event. The parade featured legendary Soviet T-34 tank, artillery systems and Tornado multiple launch rocket systems, BMP-3 infantry fighting vehicles, Tigr, UAZ, Taifun armored vehicles, T-72B3 tanks, BTR-82A armored fighting vehicles, S-400 air defense missile systems and Iskander-M missile systems.

Fellow countrymen from 19 countries and 13 Russian regions came to St. Petersburg to take part in the event.

The siege of Leningrad (currently St. Petersburg) started on September 8, 1941 and lasted 872 days. It was broken on January 18, 1943, in the course of the Iskra strategic military operation during the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany and was completely lifted on January 27, 1944. Leningrad is the only large city in the world’s history that withstood almost 900-day encirclement.

No more than 800,000 residents were remaining in the city by the end of the siege out of the 3 million people that had lived in Leningrad and its suburbs. According to various estimates, from 641,000 to 1 million Leningraders died as a result of hunger, bombings and artillery shelling. Almost 34,000 people were wounded, 716,000 residents were left without shelter and 1.7 million were evacuated across the Road of Life and by air in 1941-1942.

TASS also reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin laid flowers on Sunday at a monument in the Leningrad Region commemorating warriors who died during the Nazi-led siege of Leningrad.

The ceremony was also attended by Russian Presidential Envoy to the North-Western Federal District Alexander Gutsan and Leningrad Region Governor Alexander Drozdenko.

The monument ‘Boundary Stone’ was built in memory of soldiers who fought during the blockade at Nevsky Pyatachok, some 50 km east south-east of Leningrad. Combat actions there were carried out in order to break through the blockade. Some 50,000 Red Army soldiers and officers were killed in the operation, while Germany’s losses were estimated at 10,000.

According to Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov, the anniversary is "a very important date for the entire country, for all Russians and personally for President Putin." The Russian leader earlier recalled that his father Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin went immediately to the front after the war broke out where he fought and was heavily wounded at Nevsky Pyatachok, near blockaded Leningrad.

Later, Putin also laid flowers at the Mother Motherland monument on Piskarevsky cemetery. This is not the first time Putin visits the cemetery during the days commemorating the lifting of the Leningrad siege. Traditionally, he also visits a mass grave, where his brother Viktor, who died during the siege, was buried.

The Russian president is due to take part in several other events, which will be held on Sunday in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region to mark the 75th anniversary since the lifting of the siege of Leningrad.