BREST, 23 June (BelTA) - The Nazi blitzkrieg failed literally at the walls of the Brest Fortress in the first hours of the Great Patriotic War, Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko said at a ceremony to lay wreaths in the Brest Fortress on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the Great Patriotic War on 22 June, BelTA has learned.
“In early July friends and enemies of the USSR were wondering how long the country would last - two weeks, three, maybe a month? Berlin strategists were planning a fascist parade on Red Square in Moscow. But here, near the walls of the Belarusian Brest citadel, the Nazi blitzkrieg went off the tracks literally in the first hours of the war. Remember this ‘word blitzkrieg'. It failed when, in the last minutes of his short life, a soldier scribbled on the wall: "I'm dying, but not surrending! Farewell, Motherland!" Aleksandr Lukashenko stressed
“Today, unfortunately, the names of many defenders of the Brest Fortress still remain unknown and we do not know how they died, where they were buried,” the president added.
He noted with regret that just a few weeks ago the last witness of those events, Piotr Kotelnikov, passed away. "His name will always live in the memory of the people, along the names of his combat comrades Lieutenant Kizhevatov, Captain Zubachev, Major Gavrilov and thousands of other Soviet heroes,” the Belarusian leader is convinced. “They did not allow the Nazis to take a stronghold over the Bug River in eight hours. Three weeks later, the Nazis were approaching to Smolensk, but the Brest Fortress continued fighting."
The participants of the ceremony observed a minute of silence in memory of the war heroes.
