OREANDA-NEWS. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will take part in festive events on Friday dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Northern Army from the Nazi occupation by the Red Army. National celebrations will be held in Kirkenes near the border with the Murmansk region. King of Norway Harald V, Prime Minister Erna Sulberg, deputies of the Storting (Parliament) will take part in them. Vice-Admiral Alexander Moiseev, Commander of the Northern Fleet, will also participate in the events at the invitation of the Norwegian side.

During the Petsamo-Kirkenes operation in October 1944, more than 2 thousand soldiers of the Red Army were killed in Norway. As Moscow noted with gratitude, the Norwegian people cherish the memory of these events: Soviet military burials are kept in exemplary order, painstaking work is being done to establish the names of Soviet prisoners of war who died in Nazi camps in the country.

In the field of culture, the most striking example of cooperation this year was the inter-museum exchange: in Oslo, an exhibition from the collection of the Tretyakov Gallery was a great success, in Moscow more than 200 thousand people visited the exhibition of the Norwegian artist Edward Munch.