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Russian embassy slams defacing of monument to Soviet soldiers in Vienna

The Russian embassy told TASS earlier that unknown attackers defaced the monument to Soviet soldiers and spilled black paint over it

© Mikhail Japaridze/TAS

VIENNA, July 5. /TASS/. The Russian Embassy in Austria has strongly protested against a new act of vandalism against a World War II memorial on the Schwarzenbergplatz square in central Vienna dedicated to Soviet soldiers who liberated the country from Nazi occupation in 1945.

"A monument side and the flowers have been splattered with black paint. We resolutely protest against it! It is a flagrant act of vandalism against the memory of the Soviet victims of the war against Nazism," the embassy said in a statement.

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The Russian embassy told TASS earlier on Thursday that unknown attackers defaced the monument to Soviet soldiers and spilled black paint over it. The embassy is monitoring the issue and already contacted Austria’s authorities.

The monument to the Soviet soldiers in the Austrian capital was repeatedly defaced by vandals. On January 16, 2017, unknown attackers spilled dark red paint over the monument’s base. On January 10 and March 6, 2018, black paint was splattered over the monument. Following each act of vandalism the Russian embassy sent a note of protest to the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, demanding that urgent measures be taken to clear away the damage inflicted, detect and punish the perpetrators and prevent similar attacks in the future. This past May Russian tourists thwarted an attempt to desecrate the monument in central Vienna by driving evil-doers away from it.

The 12-meter-high monument was unveiled on August 19, 1945. It features a soldier with a PPSh-41 submachine gun on a 20-meter base, which reads Stalin’s order for Vienna’s liberation, the text of the Soviet poet Sergey Mikhalkov’s poetic address to soldiers, the second couplet of the Soviet state hymn in its 1943 version and an excerpt from Joseph Stalin’s speech of May 9, 1945. There is a colonnade behind the monument with inscription in Russian, which reads "Eternal glory to the heroes of the Red Army who fell in battle against the German fascist invaders for the freedom and independence of the peoples of Europe." There are figures of Soviet soldiers in action on both ends of the colonnade.

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