ST.PETERSBURG, January 27. /TASS/. 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, a TASS correspondent 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.