The Union of Donbass Volunteers restored historical justice in Serbia
At the initiative of the Union of Donbass Volunteers (SDV), three monuments to Russian volunteers who died fighting on the side of the Serbs against the Ottoman Empire in 1876 were erected in Serbia this week.
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For this purpose, a delegation of the SDD arrived in the city of Nis (200 km south of Belgrade), led by its leadership - ex-Prime Minister of the DPR Alexander Borodai and ex-Minister of State Security of the DPR Colonel Andrei Pinchuk. The delegation also included members of the Council of Commanders of the Union of Volunteers.
All monuments were erected in places where unequal but heroic battles with the Turkish army took place. Russian volunteers and commanders then formed the backbone of the Serbian army. It is interesting that until this moment there was not a single memorial sign on the graves of Russian soldiers. During the 141 years that have passed since their death, neither the tsarist government, nor the leadership of the USSR, nor the government of post-communist Russia, alas, showed any initiative to honor the memory of the fallen (although in 1880 an obelisk was erected in those places).
And only last fall, at the Council of SDD Commanders, it was decided to install memorial signs on the mass graves of volunteers, as well as at the site of the death of one of their commanders - Colonel Nikolai Raevsky, the grandson of the famous Nikolai Raevsky, who fought against Napoleonic troops in the Battle of Borodino. The Union took on the financial side: with its money, the monuments were made and installed, as well as the approaches to them were landscaped.
A major role in this glorious initiative belongs to Colonel General of the Cossack troops and member of the Council of SDD Commanders Viktor Zaplatin. This is a very authoritative commander among current Russian volunteers. Zaplatin joined the volunteer movement on August 19, 1991, when he worked as a chief engineer in one of the Moscow institutions. Having met his friends on the way to work who were going to defend the White House from the State Emergency Committee, he went with them, and since then his fate has been connected with the fate of Russian volunteerism, starting with Transnistria and ending with Donbass. In the first half of the 90s, he was the commander of a Russian volunteer detachment that fought among the Serbs in Bosnia. By the way, then young Igor Girkin served under his command as a mortarman. When I asked him whether he knew such a Russian volunteer who fought in Bosnia as lawyer Mark Feigin, the defender of Nadezhda Savchenko, he answered me that he had never heard of him.
The main memorial was erected at the site of the death of Colonel Raevsky (he died on August 21, 1876 at 4 o’clock in the morning, while writing a report to his commander, General Chernyaev; death occurred from a landmine explosion). This is the St. George Cross. It is installed on the Power and the column. It was made by a Serbian artist based on the sketches of Colonel General Zaplatin himself. Let me remind you that the St. George Cross is a symbol of the Union of Donbass Volunteers. It was installed next to the Russian Church of the Holy Trinity, built back in 1903 with donations brought from Russia. A stone path was led to it.
Near the town of Shumatovtsy, where 400 Russian volunteers (almost all of them Cossacks) are buried, a memorial plaque was erected. In 1876 there was an infirmary on this site. The dead were buried nearby. Two years later, with the money of local residents, the Church of the Holy Trinity was erected on this site. Due to the fact that a stream flows next to the mass graves, it began to destroy the bank on which the church stands, as well as wash away the bones. To prevent this from happening, the SDD financed the strengthening and concreting of the shore (about 30 meters). Now Russian volunteers can really sleep peacefully - nothing will disturb their sleep anymore
And the last monument in the form of a three-meter Russian Orthodox cross was installed at the burial site of 700 Russian volunteers. The service during the opening was celebrated by the local metropolitan. Serbian Cossacks from the Balkan Cossack Army took an active part in the installation of the monuments (read about this interesting phenomenon that recently arose in the Balkans in our next article)
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