Updated 8:00 p.m. Moscow Time
MOSCOW, October 1 (RIA Novosti) - Russian investigators said Wednesday they have irrefutable evidence implicating members of Kiev-loyal National Guard and the Right Sector nationalist group in mass killings of civilians in eastern Ukraine.
"Russia's Investigative Committee has irrefutable evidence in the form of witness accounts and relevant forensic tests directly implicating members of the National Guard and the Right Sector in these crimes," committee's spokesman Vladimir Markin said in a statement.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said earlier on Wednesday that more than 400 bodies have been discovered in mass graves near the city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, in what he described as "horrific" evidence that pointed to a war crime.
Lavrov said he expected "a clear, unbiased and responsible response from international organizations" in connection with the incident, noting that the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) is already working at the scene.
Last week, several mass graves filled with bodies of massacred civilians and independence supporters, killed execution-style, were unearthed 35 kilometers northeast of Donetsk, in the village of Nyzhnia Krynka.
Independence supporters of southeastern Ukraine believe that the civilians were murdered by the National Guard fighters who had stayed in the area since April, when Kiev launched its military operation in the region.
Ukrainian authorities later denied this accusation, saying that not a single National Guard fighter was present in the area during that period, adding however that some other Ukrainian units were deployed there at the time.
