ST. PETERSBURG, January 27. /TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery in the city of St. Petersburg on Thursday to honor the defenders of the city and the victims of the Siege of Leningrad that was lifted 78 years ago today.

The head of state laid flowers at a common grave, which, according to documents, contains the remains of his brother who died as a child during the Siege of Leningrad. The president also laid a wreath at the Motherland monument.

Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery is the largest common burial site of World War II, where about half a million residents and defenders of Leningrad were buried during the siege. Only some 150,000 of them have been identified so far and search activities continue to this day.

Putin, a Leningrad resident born in 1952, participates in memorial events dedicated to the Siege of Leningrad on a regular basis. It is a very personal story for the president. His father Vladimir Putin fought at the Nevsky Pyatachok southeast of Leningrad during the siege, his mother stayed at the city for the entire duration of the siege and his elder brother Viktor died of diphtheria in the besieged city in the winter of 1942.

This year marks the 78th anniversary of the lifting of the German Siege of Leningrad. The siege, which lasted 872 days from September 8, 1941, to January 27, 1944, claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of the city’s residents. Historians still find it difficult to give a specific number, which ranges from 500,000 to 1.5 mln people. The Battle of Leningrad went down in history as one of the longest and deadliest fights of World War II.