On September 13, Vitebsk / Sergey Kochetov - BELTA /. The remains of nine Red Army soldiers were discovered today in the vicinity of the village of Noviki, Vitebsk district. This was reported to a BELTA correspondent by Ivan Tetushkin, company commander of the 52nd Separate Specialized Search Battalion. The remains of the servicemen were accidentally found by searchers while defusing explosive ordnance discovered during field work 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. Specialists are currently completing the extraction of the remains from the ground, after which they will be handed over to the local authorities for reburial and perpetuation of the memory of the fallen, noted Ivan Tetushkin. Field search operations near Vitebsk are organized as part of the international "Memory Watch of the Commonwealth Countries-2011", in which the 52nd Separate Specialized Search Battalion of the Ministry of Defence of Belarus and activists of the search movement from Belarus and Russia are participating. The operations are organized in the Vitebsk district, where over 42,000 Soviet servicemen died in battles for the liberation of Vitebsk during the war from autumn 1943 to summer 1944. Following the ten-day "Memory Watch", it is planned to hold a solemn reburial ceremony for the found remains in one of the mass graves in the Vitebsk district. -0-

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