As I suspected, the problem was in xerces libraries. If I'm not mistaken, Spring's dependencies contain xercesImpl dependency, but neither dependency with artifactId xmlParserAPIs nor xerces. I have been just hopelessly refactoring my pom.xml file and included the following dependencies and the rest was a matter of magic:
<dependency>
<groupId>xerces</groupId>
<artifactId>xmlParserAPIs</artifactId>
<version>2.6.2</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>xerces</groupId>
<artifactId>xerces</artifactId>
<version>2.4.0</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>xerces</groupId>
<artifactId>xmlParserAPIs</artifactId>
<version>2.6.2</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>xerces</groupId>
<artifactId>xerces</artifactId>
<version>2.4.0</version>
</dependency>