Victory Day, Europe Day marked

Victory Day, Europe Day marked

BELGRADE -- The marking of Day of Victory over Nazism in World War II started late on Thursday with a ceremonial artillery salute fired from the Belgrade Fortress.

The main Victory Day event, to be lead by Minister of Labour and Veteran Affairs Aleksandar Vulin, will start with a wreath-laying ceremony at the cemetery of the WWII liberators of Belgrade.

Taking part in the ceremony will be representatives of the Ministry of Defense and the Serbian Army, an association of WWII veterans, the city of Belgrade as well as officials of the Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian and Azerbaijani embassies.

Serbian diplomatic representatives will lay wreaths at Serbian WWII military memorials and massacre sites in Albania, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Great Britain, Greece, Egypt, Israel, Italy, Hungary, Macedonia, Germany, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, France, Croatia, Montenegro, the Czech Republic, Spain and other countries.

Victory Day, a national holiday, will be marked with traditional educational activities in primary and secondary schools, as well as by ceremonies and gatherings at military memorials and massacre sites in many Serbian municipalities and cities, the statement said.

May 9, is also marked Europe Day to commemorate the day when the then French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman laid the foundations of a united Europe in 1950.

Sixty-four years ago today, just after the end of World War II, at a time when the mistrust between arch-enemies France and Germany was still running deep, Schuman published a document that would go down in history as the Schuman Declaration, proposing the establishment of a European federation as a means of preserving...