The Russian missile that hit a residential building in the city of Dniepropetrovsk/Dnipro on 14 January – killing 44 people, seriously injuring 75 others and destroying 236 apartments – was shot down by Ukraine’s air defenses.

Ukrainian and NATO media have unabashedly accused Russia of a “war crime”, which Russia has denied.

President Volodymyr Zelensky’s special adviser for strategic communications, Oleksii Arestovych, at first claimed that this incident was the result of a miscalculation by Ukrainian air defense, therefore suggesting Moscow had no intention of striking the building. He then retracted his assertion and finally confirmed it. At the request of the integral nationalist MPs, he was immediately relieved of his functions.

The Russian Ministry of Defense underscored that it never targets civilian apartment blocks and that its missile was indeed brought down by Ukrainian anti-aircraft defense, which missed its military target thereby destroying a civilian apartment building in Dniepropetrovsk/Dnipro.