According to him, during a small raid towards the German fortifications, his father was wounded by a grenade fragmentation, which battered his legs.
"His neighbor in Peterhof (a suburb of Leningrad) brought him under enemy fire to the other bank of the Neva River, delivered him to the hospital and said farewell to him because only the wounded had the chance to survive. He told him: "You will live while I will evidently never see you again" and returned again to the other bank of the Neva where combat was in progress," the President said.
"However, it so happened that he also survived but they did not know about that. Accidentally, they met in the city 20 years later," he added.
The Nevsky Pyatachok is the patch, which extended slightly over 2 kilometers along the Neva and was about several hundred meters deep. The bloodiest combats were carried out for this patch of land. About 200,000 Soviet Army soldiers and defenders of Leningrad blockaded by the fascists died there.