A bad weather forecast for Saturday has forced the the organisers of the central ceremony of Victory and Homeland Thanksgiving Day in Knin to change the venue of the event from the football stadium to the city's main square, which will be partly covered.

The ceremony will start at 6:30 am with a traditional reveille in the streets of Knin, while tributes to the the Croatian defenders killed or gone missing will be paid at the Croatian Victory Monument in Ante Starcevica Square, starting at 9:20.

The hoisting of the flag by 12 war veterans at Knin Fortress is scheduled for 9:40, and the ceremony will be shown on a video wall in the main square. During the ceremony, the names of the 244 defenders killed during the operation, will be read.

On 5 August, Croatia celebrates Victory and Homeland Thanksgiving Day, War Veterans’ Day and the 28th anniversary of Operation Storm.

Operation Storm, a combined military and police offensive, crushed a Serb armed insurgency in central Croatia and the Dalmatian hinterland in August 1995 and restored Croatian sovereignty over the occupied central and southern parts of the country.

The offensive was launched at 5 am on 4 August 1995 along the line running from Bosansko Grahovo to the south to Jasenovac to the east, the front line being more than 630 kilometres long. Within the following 84 hours slightly less than 10,500 square kilometres of territory, almost a fifth of the country, was liberated.

The operation culminated on 5 August when the Croatian Army’s 4th and 7th Guard Brigades liberated Knin, the heart of the Serb rebellion, and displayed a 20-metre-long Croatian flag on the city’s fortress at noon.

About 200,000 Croatian soldiers and police took part in the largest operation of the 1991-1995 war.

Operation Storm marked the end of the war in Croatia, created conditions for the peaceful reintegration of the eastern Danube River region, helped break the siege of the northwestern Bosnian town of Bihac, and enabled the return of refugees and displaced persons.