Russian soldiers shot dead five civilians in Ukraine, prosecutors say

KYIV (Reuters) -Ukrainian authorities have opened a war crime investigation into an incident in which a witness said Russian forces shot dead five civilians in a village in eastern Ukraine.

The Donetsk region's prosecutor's office said in a statement on Thursday that a man, his two sons and two neighbours had been killed on October 20 in Zvanivka near the front line in Donetsk, much of which is occupied by Russia.

Russia did not immediately comment on the incident.

The prosecutor's office statement said a married couple and one of their sons had been hiding in a basement when Russian soldiers burst in, demanding information about the whereabouts of Ukrainian forces.

The soldiers left after receiving no answers but one returned and opened fire with an automatic weapon, it said.

The man and his elder son were killed and the woman was left for dead after being wounded in the face.

When she came to her senses, she went looking for her younger son, who had gone to fetch water from a neighbour before the soldiers' arrival. She found him dead in the neighbour's house along with a 62-year-old woman and her 30-year-old son, the statement said.

The wounded woman, who was not named, survived the incident and was interviewed by prosecutors in a hospital in territory controlled by Ukraine.

"Prosecutors interrogated her and recorded evidence of another war crime against the civilian population," the statement said.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in March that more than 183,000 alleged war crimes had been documented by Ukraine since Moscow's 2022 invasion. Moscow has denied its soldiers have committed atrocities and says the West has ignored Ukraine's crimes, a charge denied by Kyiv.

(Reporting by Yuliia Dysa, Writing by Timothy Heritage, Editing by Ed Osmond)