MOSCOW. Jan 30 (Interfax) - The Russian Foreign Ministry has said that France has restored gravestone inscriptions following an incident involving Russian soldiers' graves in Grenoble, in which the indication of their nationality disappeared as a result of gravestone restoration.
"In their reply, the French authorities admitted the mistake which occurred, as was already mentioned, inadvertently during the restoration work. They promised they would restore the texts, which they did, one of these days. We have been informed about it by the Russian Embassy which provided photographs of the restored gravestones. We hope there will be no repeat of such incidents in France, nor elsewhere in Europe," the Russian Foreign Ministry's Department of Information and Press said on the ministry's website on Thursday.
After the media reported that gravestone inscriptions had been removed from the graves of Russian soldiers, who died in the First World War, at the Saint Roch cemetery in Grenoble, the Russian ambassador to France, Alexander Orlov, wrote to the French Defense Ministry's State Secretary for veterans' affairs, to the French Foreign Ministry and to the authorities of the Isere Department where the cemetery is located.
"The ambassador stressed that at the time when our countries are jointly marking the anniversary of the beginning of WWI, the idea of erasing - under the pretext of gravestone restoration - the memory of the ethnicity of our soldiers, who gave their lives on the French ground, looks blasphemous. The ambassador called for urgent measures to restore these inscriptions in their initial form," the commentary said.