BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS
DATE:
26/07/2007
Remains of Napoleonic soldiers found in Belarus
Minsk - The remains of 224 soldiers who served French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte were found in the former Soviet republic of Belarus, the Belapan news agency reported Wednesday.
A Belarusian army search unit found the graves in a rural region of the central Minsk province.
Talks were in progress with representatives with French government representatives to transfer the graves to the site of an 1812 battlefield, also in Belarus, said Viktor Shumsky, an army spokesman.
Paris has requested the soldiers be reburied near the Belarusian town Borisov, by the Berezina River, Shumsky said.
During its retreat from Russia, Napoleon's Grande Armee was ravaged by Cossacks and cold weather during a crossing of the river from November 26 to 29 1812.
Creation of a formal cemetary for the Napoleonic soldiers was complicated, Shumsky said, by the need to clear its construction with Belarusian ecological and historical protection agencies, as the site already contains a memorial to a forced crossing of the Berezina by Red Army troops in 1944.
The French soldiers' remains would be 'fully protected in any case,' he said.
c 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Source:
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