🟢"Today is indeed a very touching and significant meeting with our veterans on the eve of the great holiday - Victory Day.

It is a great honour for me to present our veterans with the medal "80 Years of Victory in the Great Patriotic War". I do this both as Minister of Defence, as a grandson of participants in the Great Patriotic War, and as a citizen of a country where the memory of the feat of our veterans is part of our national idea. In our country, this is inviolable.

Let everything in the world turn upside down, but it is important for us for one simple reason: because it concerns us personally.

Historical memory is the memory of our families and friends. And there is probably not a single family in Belarus that would not have been affected by that war.

As for the situation in other countries: we see what is going on in the world. It hasn't started today. Today it has become demonstrative and defiant, when in the Baltic States, not quietly but loudly - under the slogan of decommunisation - monuments to Red Army soldiers are being destroyed. When the United States does not hesitate to declare its superior role in the victory in the Second World War. In Germany, which gave birth to fascism, today Belarusians and Russians are forbidden to visit memorial sites. Despite the indignation of its population, Moldovan authorities banned the celebration of Victory Day...

It is even shameful today to voice these examples in the same hall with veterans, living witnesses of those events, which in some countries are so fiercely erased from the pages of history.

No matter how hard they try to erase this memory, it will not work. There is no eraser of this kind. It is impossible. This memory will live in our hearts and minds. And we will pass it on to our children and grandchildren.

And the more they demolish these monuments, the louder our voices will sound, and we will show the truth and the true face of those who wanted to destroy us"

🟢«Испытываю ощущение гордости, что за многолетний труд и в преддверии такой прекрасной даты главой государства мне была вручена такая высокая государственная награда.

Это большое достижение не только мое, но и ансамбля в целом, руководства Министерства обороны. Будем двигаться дальше к новым победам и новым свершениям».