ST. PETERSBURG, August 08. /ITAR-TASS/. A monument to Serbian and Russian soldiers who died on WWI battlefields was dispatched from St. Petersburg to the Serbian capital Belgrade on Friday. The granite cut cross topped by the bronze statue of St. George the Victorious will be installed in a park outside Belgrade’s Kalemegdan fortress, a scene of fierce WWI battles, by September 18.

“The Kalemegdan fortress and the park adjacent to it are located in the heart of Belgrade. They have the same meaning for it as the Peter and Paul’s Fortress for St. Petersburg or the Kremlin for Moscow. The decision to install the monument here is very important for Russian-Serbian friendship,” Mikhail Petrov, the deputy director of a company that made the cross, told ITAR-TASS.

Serbia will become a second country after France to have a WWI memorial to Russian soldiers, designed by St. Petersburg sculptor Andrei Charkin, in its territory.

Russia has three monuments to WWI heroes installed in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Russia’s westernmost enclave of Kaliningrad.