Deputy premier calls for creating Museum of Armor near Belgorod by 2015

PROKHOROVKA, Belgorod region, July 12 (Itar-Tass) - A European-class Museum of Armored Vehicles might be set up near the township of Prokhorovka, Russia’s southwest Belgorod region, by 2015 when Russia marks the 70th anniversary since VE-Day, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin told reporters Friday.

He said he would make a request to President Vladimir Putin at a session of the Victory Steering Committee to create the museum on the historic field where the most grandiose tank battle in history took place in the summer of 1943.

The display of armored vehicles will be permanent and the technologies shown there will bring up recollections of the events of World War II.

The vehicles that were brought to Prokhorovka in connection with the jubilee of the tank battle belong to the Defense ministry and the Vadim Zadorozhny Museum of Technologies.

“Still, Prokhorovka deserves getting a museum of its own instead of hosting the just hosting the exhibits form other places,” Rogozin said.

If President Putin gives consent to the idea, then “we’ll organize work on it rapidly and the place will get a full-fledged museum,” he said.

Along with it, he admitted that the vehicles, which took part in the combat operations back in 1943, are yet to be found.

“They are located in different places now and we’ll also have to put them into order, bring them here and build an appropriate display floor by the time,” Rogozin said.

“By the 70th anniversary of VE-Day, that’s in 2015, the museum should be there in place because we have more than enough time in the run-up to that date,” he said.

The township of Prokhorovka is a railway station on a major railway linking Moscow and the Ukrainian city of Kharkov. It is located in the Belgorod region, roughly halfway between the cities of Kursk and Belgorod.

The event that earned a permanent place for it on the historical map of the world was the Battle of the Kursk Salient that took place there July 12, 1943, when an advancing tank group of the Wehrmacht bumped into an amassed counterstrike delivered by Soviet amored units.