YEREVAN, April 30 (RIA Novosti) – More than 20,000 black-and-orange St. George ribbons will be handed out in Armenia to commemorate the 69th anniversary of the victory in World War II, the president of an Armenian historical club has said.
“The overall number of St. George ribbons, handed out during the years when the event was held in the republic, has exceeded 60,000,” Lilit Asoyat, who heads the Victoria Historian Club, said during a video link discussing the upcoming event.
Armenia held the first such St. George Ribbon campaign in 2011 at the initiative of a youth organization devoted to developing Russian-Armenian relations. Last year, more than 500 people joined the commemorative event.
Some 600,000 people from Armenia, with a population of 1.2 million at that time, were conscripted into the Red Army during the war to repulse the Nazi invasion, with 107 being awarded the prestigious order Hero of the Soviet Union. “This is a feather in the republic’s cap,” Asoyat said.
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.
