An adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Tuesday that he would resign after an uproar over remarks that the adviser made in the wake of a Russian strike that left 44 people dead in the city of Dnipro.

Ukrainian lawmakers had called for the dismissal of the adviser, Oleksii Arestovych, after he suggested, in a televised interview shortly after the attack in Dnipro on Saturday, that the Russian missile had been struck by Ukraine’s air defence system and then crashed into a nine-storey apartment building.

Ukrainian officials said that the missile that struck the building was a Kh-22, a longrange Russian anti-ship missile, that had not been intercepted, and that the evidence from the scene pointed to a direct strike on the building.

The death toll in the Dnipro attack rose to 44 on Tuesday after the body of a child was found under the rubble, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, the deputy head of the Ukrainian President’s office, said in a post on the Telegram messaging app.

Three other children were among the dead, Tymoshenko said. Twenty-five people were still missing as of Tuesday morning, according to Ukraine’s State Emergency Service.

“The Armed Forces of Ukraine have no weapons capable of shooting down this type of missile,” Hanna Maliar, the deputy defence minister, said.

The Ukrainian Air Force also said that the country’s armed forces did not have the right equipment to shoot down the missile, and added: “Since the beginning of Russia’s military aggression, more than 210 missiles of this type have been launched at the territory of Ukraine. None of them has been shot down by air defence systems.”

Britain’s defence ministry said on Tuesday that Russia had “falsely implied a Ukrainian air defence missile was responsible” for the attack on Dnipro.

Arestovych apologised in a post on Facebook the day after making his comment, but it had already drawn intense public scrutiny.

New York Times News Service