Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksander Kuzmuk offered to quit immediately after last week's Russian plane crash which many believe to have been caused by a stray Ukrainian missile, a senior official said yesterday.
"The minister tendered his resignation immediately after the first report implying that it could be a missile," Mr Ihor Storozhuk, spokesman for President Leonid Kuchma, said.
He said the president had refused the offer and wanted to await the outcome of an investigation into the disaster. All 78 crew and passengers died after the Sibir airline jet exploded at high altitude and crashed into the Black Sea a week ago last Thursday.
Mr Kuzmuk has insisted repeatedly since the crash that his troops could not have been responsible, saying the missile exercises on the Crimean peninsula were out of range of the airliner.
However, there is growing evidence pointing to a missile strike. Yesterday, a Russian newspaper reported that the pilot of the doomed jet knew his Tupolev Tu-154 airliner had been hit.
As the stricken plane plunged thousands of feet, Russian air traffic control officials heard the pilot desperately ask his crew where the jet had been damaged.
"This is all we heard. The pilot asked one of his crew, 'Where are we hit?' You see, it looks like he was trying to get precise information about the damage caused by the missile explosion," Mr Vladimir Zhukov, deputy chief of Russia's North Caucasus air traffic control, told Kommersant newspaper.
Russian experts said on Tuesday they had found what appeared to be missile parts in the debris of the jet. Shortly after the crash, US officials said a spy satellite showed a missile plume in the vicinity of the disaster.
The Kommersant report said investigators, citing evidence from the bodies trawled from the crash site, believe many of the passengers and crew were alive during the death plunge.
Most of the passengers on the plane, flying from Tel Aviv to Novosibirsk in Siberia, were Russian-born Israelis.
Russian, Ukrainian and Israeli experts in the Black Sea port of Sochi are sifting through wreckage and human remains to try to solve the mystery.
Only 15 bodies have been found. The black box flight recorders remain on the seabed, too deep for easy retrieval at more than 1,000 metres.