Russian veterans beat lockdown to mark Victory Day
- Published
Zinaida Korneva's war stories raise money for Covid-19 families
The Covid-19 outbreak has robbed Russians of the planned military parades to mark this year's 75th anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany, but some veterans are celebrating the occasion in their own way.
Parades are traditionally held on Red Square on 9 May to showcase the country's military hardware, but the government has postponed them until later in the year.
Instead, festivities will be largely limited to air displays in 32 cities, along with fireworks and smaller shows of military equipment elsewhere.
And the Immortal Regiment parade - which sees 100,000s of people carrying portraits of their relatives who died in the war - has been moved online, external.
'Personal parades'
But some veterans have had their own parades organised by the military, external, Rossiya 1 TV reports.
In the Leningrad Region town of Luga, Viktor Polyachkov, who took part in the storming of Berlin, had a military band march past his house to mark his 95th birthday with Soviet wartime songs.
An army band played for Viktor Polyachkov
Lev Atmeneyev, who served as a gunner with a Katyusha rocket-launcher crew, had a new version of the famed artillery piece brought to his house, external, as shown on local Samara TV.
For former Soviet infantryman Lazar Ioffe in Yekaterinburg, a special screen was put up near his house so he could watch an air display rehearsal, external of Su-34 fighter jets, and one of their pilots sent him a personal if virtual victory congratulation, the defence ministry's Zvezda TV reports.
You may also be interested in:
But one veteran, 97-year-old Zinaida Korneva from St Petersburg, decided to use her war experience to help the families of doctors who have died in the battle against Covid-19.
'From Russia, with love'
Inspired by Britain's Captain Tom Moore, she decided to raise money by telling stories about the war.
Her relatives helped set up a YouTube channel for her, and in the first video she promised to knit socks for Captain Tom's 100th birthday, external "from Russia with love, to keep him warm".
She has already managed to raise more than a third of her target of three million roubles (about £32,000; $40,000), and plans to keep on video blogging until 9 May, external, the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily reports.
The Labour Ministry estimates that there were about 75,000 veterans of the Second World War still alive in Russia last year.
Zinaida sent Captain Tom Moore birthday greetings in her first video
Reporting by Yaroslava Kiryukhina
Next story: Singapore's home businesses lament lockdown shutdown