UNITED NATIONS, January 20. /TASS/. The Kiev regime "gags" those in Ukraine who recognize the obvious about the civilian victims of Ukrainian troops, as it happened with ex-Ukrainian Presidential Aide Alexey Arestovich, Russia’s Permanent Representative to the UN Vasily Nebenzya said on Friday.

"Ukrainian propaganda in general tries, by hook or by crook, to prevent the spread of information that the residents of Ukrainian cities and settlements most often die from the bullets of those who were supposed to protect them - nationalist battalions and the units of Ukraine’s armed forces," he said at an Arria-formula meeting of the UN Security Council on Ukraine’s shelling attacks in Donbass organized by the Russian side.

"That said, as soon as somebody in the West or in Ukraine recognizes these obvious facts, he is immediately muzzled. For instance, this is what happened with the mouthpiece of Kiev’s propaganda, Ukrainian Presidential Aide Arestovich who, after disclosing the details of a tragedy in Dnepropetrovsk, was accused of spreading Russian propaganda and forced to resign," the envoy added.

Ukrainian Presidential Aide Alexey Arestovich submitted his resignation on January 14 after he was sharply criticized for saying that part of a residential building in Dnepropetrovsk had collapsed because a projectile shot down by Ukrainian air defenses fell on it. On January 16, Ukrainian legislator Alexey Goncharenko reported that a petition to fire Arestovich was launched. On January 17, Ukraine’s presidential office accepted Arestovich’s resignation and relieved him of his duties.