SEVASTOPOL, November 4. /TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived at the Karantinnaya Bay in Sevastopol on Thursday to lay flowers at the monument to victims of the Russian Civil War (1917-1922).
The ceremony is timed to coincide with National Unity Day marked in Russia on November 4.
After that, the president is scheduled to hold a working meeting with Sevastopol Governor Mikhail Razvozzhayev. Later on Thursday, also from Sevastopol, Putin will take part in a session of the Supreme Council of the Union State of Russia and Belarus, held via videoconference.
The monument to those who fought in the Civil War was ordered by the Russian Military Historical Society, following the Russian president’s instruction. It consists of several sculptures and the eternal flame on the shore of the Karantinnaya Bay, located not far from the Tauric Chersonese National Preserve and Cape Khrustalny. The memorial was unveiled this April.
In the autumn of 1920, after the Red Army swept into Crimea, 126 ships and vessels carrying about 150,000 refugees, who were officers of General Pyotr Wrangel’s army, members of their families and the White Army supporters, fled from the peninsula’s ports, with Sevastopol among them. That marked the end of the Civil War battles and its end for the south of Russia. However, the end of confrontation across the country is generally dated by 1922.