The Eternal Flame tank in the Uzbek city of Kokand was deliberately smashed on May 9 and the recording was posted on social media, said incident witness Andrei Shatalin, AsiaToday agency reported on May 13.
On May 9, the day of the 79th anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War, Andrei Shatalin took his young granddaughter to the Eternal Flame and took a specially designed children’s car with pedals in the shape of a Soviet-era tank. He placed flags of Uzbekistan and the Red Flag of Victory on a makeshift tank.
However, aggressive bloggers, precisely to provoke citizens who came to honor the memory of their compatriots who fell on the battlefield, destroyed a toy tank in which small children were playing, frightening them and causing them psychological trauma, Shatalin emphasized.
“As it was hot, I went to the shade of the trees in front of the monument. About five minutes later, the granddaughter runs, all crying, and she says that some guys are breaking her tank. “I ran to the monument and there two unknown people broke a child’s tank, tore off the banner, threw it, kicked the tank and at the same time filmed everything on video and uploaded it to the Internet (infobloggers).”Shatalin said.
Also read: In Tashkent, during a concert on May 8, a red flag was snatched from my grandmother’s hands.
Shatalin ran to the scene of the tragedy, picked up the broken barrel of the tank, a meter-long plastic pipe, and began to disperse the villains.
People who approached the monument were also outraged and helped Shatalin. The provocateurs walked away, still filming everything.
“For me, as a citizen of the Republic of Uzbekistan, the grandson of my grandfather, who shed blood during the Great Patriotic War, that attitude towards the symbol of our republic, the flag, as well as the common symbol of our Great Patriotic War, The victory, the Banner of Victory, in the Eternal Flame, became offensive.”– said Shatalin.
Shatalin stressed that on such a day it is not allowed to mock the 420,000 fellow combatants who lived to see it. He recalled that 160 thousand Uzbeks simply disappeared during the war. Furthermore, this is a mockery of state symbols, which is also an insult.
Shatalin reportedly wrote a statement addressed to the head of the State Security Service of Uzbekistan for the city of Kokand. Shatalin managed to photograph one of the provocateurs. In his statement, Shatalin asks to find the provocateurs and force them to compensate for both the moral and material damage they caused.
Let us keep in mind that in our material times there are simply no other means of influencing criminals than imprisonment. At the same time, it is outrageous that, for the sake of likes on social networks, bloggers resort to direct provocations, without even taking into account the fact that the president of Uzbekistan, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, was at the parade in Moscow and is actively building relations with the head of Russia, Vladimr Putin.
Source: Rossa Primavera
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