Moscow to remember Donetsk mass grave victims

Russian human rights activists have announced plans to hold a rally on Saturday in downtown Moscow to remember the victims found in mass graves near eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk earlier this week.
The event organizers, the National Parents Association and the Mothers of Russia group, have condemned the killings of innocent people, comparing them to the atrocities by fascists during World War II.
“Those who were subjected to demonstration execution were young men and women, peaceful citizens of Ukraine’s southeast, who had their dreams and a whole life to live. Unfortunately, the war came to their homes and neither of their dreams will come true,” the statement on a popular Russian social networking site, VKontakte, says.
The organizers are planning to demand an international investigation of this tragedy.
“The Ukrainian authorities must stop covering up atrocities and lawlessness on the country’s territory. The genocide of the Ukrainian people must end. No to fascism!” the statement reads.
Military police in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic found on September 23 three unmarked graves allegedly containing multiple bodies, OSCE Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said in its daily report.
Two of the burials were located in a coal mine Komunar near the village Nyzhnia Krynka, some 35 kilometers (21.7 miles) northeast of Donetsk, and one inside the village, the OSCE report said. Earlier the territory was under the control of the Ukrainian army and the National Guard’s battalion Aidar.
One of the mass graves contained some 40 bodies of civilians, while the two others had the bodies of captured militia members and Ukrainian soldiers, the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic's Prime Minister Alexander Zakharchenko said on Thursday.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry believes the mass burial of civilians near Donetsk is a military crime that could have been committed by Ukraine’s National Guard, and insists on an urgent and comprehensive international probe into the case.