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Russia to celebrate Victory Day

About ten special airplanes will be dispersing clouds over Moscow. Each airplane is provided with the required stock of ecologically-friendly reagents

MOSCOW, May 9 (Itar-Tass) —— Last gunshots of the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945) were fired 67 years ago. May 9, 1945, became the day of a great triumph of the people, who stopped the powerful Wehrmacht machine and dealt a crushing blow to the Nazism.

This day was won with blood and swear, valour and pain. The war left millions of ruined fates and claimed a great number of lives. The Soviet Union sustained the largest losses of about 27 million people. The losses of the Red Army exceeded 8,860,000 people. Therefore, May 9 is called as "a holiday with tears," in which the greatness and sorrow, bright orders and the tears of veterans combined.

Decades passed after the war but May 9 has not lost its status of a national and uniting holiday. Neither the change of epochs, nor "the parade of sovereignties," nor attempts to revise the Second World War results have overshadowed the greatness of the feat of the Soviet people. Russia remembers this feat and still believes that the state is in an irreparable debt to the memory of those, who perished in this war and those who survived.

About four million war veterans remain alive in their thin ranks, the Ministry of Health and Social Development said. More than a half of them are workers of the home front, the widows of war veterans, members of the Siege of Leningrad and the prisoners of concentration camps. About 200,000 war veterans live in the Moscow Hero City. The Russian capital will be the center of national celebrations. Military hardware and helicopter gunships will participate in a military parade of the Moscow garrison on the Red Square. About 14,000 servicemen will participate in the parade.

Muscovites and guests of the city will remember May 9, which is the day of national proud and gratitude to the war veterans, with massive gatherings and festive concerts. War veterans and veterans of the Russian Armed Forces will meet on the Poklonnaya Hill.

About ten special airplanes will be dispersing clouds over Moscow. Each airplane is provided with the required stock of ecologically-friendly reagents.

Under the orders from the defence minister festive gun fireworks will be fired in Moscow, and in the Hero Cities of St. Petersburg, Volgograd, Novorossiisk, Tula, Smolensk and Murmansk, in the cities, where the headquarters of the military districts, fleets, armies and the Caspian Flotilla, and in Sevastopol.

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