BAKU, April 30 (RIA Novosti) – Azerbaijan’s capital Baku will hold its first mass St. George Ribbon event next month, to commemorate the Soviet victory in World War II, the event's organizer Farhat Ibragimov has said.
The event, dedicated to the 69th anniversary of the victory in the war, will take place in downtown Baku on May 9.
“We want these events to become a tradition, by the 70th anniversary of victory in World War II we are set to start events several days before the anniversary, on May 1,” Ibragimov said.
The Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic entered World War II together with the whole Soviet Union, on June 22, 1941. Adolf Hitler was entranced by Baku’s oilfields and expended great effort in an attempt to take the city and its oil and gas under their control. Some 681,000 people from Azerbaijan, with a population of 3.4 million at that time, were conscripted into the Red Army during the war to repulse the Nazi invasion.
The first annual St. George’s Ribbon campaign was launched by RIA Novosti in 2005. This year, the event will be run by the Rossiya Segodnya International News Agency together with over 100 media outlets globally.
On the eve of Victory Day, people will pin black-and-orange ribbons to their clothes and cars to commemorate the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War as a sign of eternal gratitude to the veterans who saved the world from Nazism.
