On September 23, Vitebsk /Olga Bogacheva - BELTA/. The reburial of the remains of over 70 Red Army soldiers will take place today in the Vitebsk district, Ivan Tetushkin, commander of a company of the 52nd separate specialized search battalion, told a BELTA correspondent. The memorial ceremony will be held at the cemetery in the village of Kopti, at the memorial named after the Leninist Komsomol, with the participation of representatives of local authorities, clergy, members of veteran and youth organizations, the public, and younger generations. Seven coffins will be lowered into one of the mass graves. Those gathered will honour the memory of the fallen with a minute of silence. The remains of the soldiers, found by participants of the international "Memory Watch of the CIS Countries-2011" during search operations in the territory of the Shachepchino and Oktyabrsky rural councils of the Vitebsk district, were preliminarily identified by fragments of clothing and personal belongings of the fallen (bowls, spoons with initials, dog tags, etc.). In the Shachepchino rural council, the searchers found them accidentally while defusing explosive ordnance. The solemn reburial ceremony concludes the ten-day "Memory Watch of the CIS Countries-2011," which involved the 52nd separate specialized search battalion of the Ministry of Defence of Belarus and activists of the search movement from Belarus and Russia. The operations were organized in the Vitebsk district, as during the war, from autumn 1943 to summer 1944, over 42,000 Soviet servicemen died in the battles for the liberation of Vitebsk. -0-

BELTA