KIROVSK /Leningrad Region/, January 27. /TASS/. On the 80th anniversary of the end of the Siege of Leningrad, Russian President Vladimir Putin laid flowers at a monument at Nevsky Pyatachok (Neva Bridgehead) in the Leningrad Region commemorating the perseverance and courage of Soviet soldiers in the battle for Leningrad.

Putin knelt down and placed red roses tied with a black mourning ribbon at the base of the monument. The president remained silent for a while before crossing himself and walking back to the car.

Nevsky Pyatachok (Neva Bridgehead) is one of the most terrible and heroic episodes in the Battle of Leningrad. On the night of September 20, 1941, the forward battalion of the 115th Infantry Division, using fishing boats and homemade rafts from the Nevskaya Dubrovka area, managed to secretly cross to the left bank of the Neva and knock out the Germans from their forward positions, gaining control of a piece of coastal land. The war over these lands lasted until 1943.

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.