MINSK, 7 January (BelTA) – Only together can we preserve the land where we live and where future generations will live, Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko said as he visited the church in Minsk on Christmas Day, BelTA has learned.
“We need to stop and think about our future. It is on this holy day that He [Lord] warns us from up there,” the head of state said. “He wants us to think about the future, to think about the future of our children. This is very relevant and very important. We must understand that only together we can preserve this piece of land so that our children could live here by their wits after us. In the New Year's address I said that we can lose everything we have. And the worst thing is that we can lose it irretrievably.”
“We can go back to how previous generations lived. After 1917, after the October Revolution, before it. We do not want our children to live like beggars and be oppressed, again. Our children don't need that,” the Belarusian leader said.
Aleksandr Lukashenko noted that the Holy Cross Exultation Church is primarily a monument to more than 80,000 Soviet people and soldiers who died in this place during the Great Patriotic War. “These were the people who did not betray, who did not give up. These were the people who fought and who died during the Great Patriotic War. It's very important for us now. Our entire Belarus, as I often say, is a monument to that war. We, Belarusians, should never glorify Nazism, even in the smallest way. Never! In the name of the memory of those who died. We must honor the people thanks to whom we live today," the head of state said.
The Church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross was built in 2020 in Timiryazeva Street in Minsk. It stands next to the Masyukovshshina Death Camp memorial complex built in honor of more than 80,000 prisoners of war and Soviet civilians tortured in the German concentration camp during the Great Patriotic War.
