ST. PETERSBURG, January 27. /TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin has laid a wreath at the monument Mother Motherland at the Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery in memory of the victims of the siege of the defiant hero city of Leningrad.

After laying a wreath at the foot of the monument, the president spread the ribbons in the colors of the national flag on it and bowed his head for a moment as a sign of sorrow for the residents and defenders of the city. The orchestra was playing Valery Khalilov's Adagio and song Ladoga. Later, in memory of all those who fell victim to the blockade of the defiant city, a minute of silence was declared.

On the way to the monument along the 300-meter alley from the Eternal Flame, the president traditionally laid flowers at one of the mass graves where his brother Viktor, who died in besieged Leningrad at a young age in the winter of 1942, rests.

Shortly before that, Putin laid flowers at the Rubezhny Kamen monument on Nevsky Prospekt in the Leningrad Region.

Piskarevskoye cemetery

The Piskaryovskoye cemetery is the largest mass grave of the WWII. During the siege, Piskareyovka was the northern outskirts of Leningrad, and mass graves were held here during the first and most severe winter of the siege. 420,000 Leningrad residents who died of hunger, cold, disease, bombing and shelling, as well as 70,000 soldiers who defended Leningrad, are buried here in mass graves. There are about 6,000 individual military graves on the memorial.

In 1960, according to the project of architects Alexander Vasilyev and Yevgeny Levinson, memorial Mother Motherland was created here, and in 2000 the Alley of Memory dedicated to the defenders of Leningrad and those who worked in the besieged city, supporting its viability, was founded.