DONETSK. June 23 (Interfax) - Several hundred people gathered in Donetsk at Lenin Square on Sunday for a rally marking the 73rd anniversary of the beginning of the Great Patriotic War.
The rally, which began with a minute of silence, was also devoted to the members of the self-defense forces of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic who were killed in the special operation conducted by the Ukrainian Army.
The rally participants held the flags of the Donetsk People's Republic and Russia and brought carnations and portraits of the people killed in the fighting with Ukrainian troops to the Lenin Monument.
Some 200 members of the Donetsk People's Republic's self-defense forces, including a dozen women took oaths at the rally. Pavel Gubarev, leader of Novorossia, and Miroslav Rudenko, a member of the Supreme Council, congratulated them at this event.
The members of the self-defense forces who returned from the fighting were denied their wages by the administration of the mine Komsomolets Donbassa on Saturday, Gubarev said, adding that the mine administration said they had not come to work. The incident was eventually settled and the mine announced that it now reports to the Donetsk People's Republic, he said.
The members of the self-defense forces have gone to Slovyansk, where the self-defense forces are now fighting Ukrainian troops.