They took her trainers. That is the detail that survives, once the rest is stripped away – the belongings removed from the corpse, the shoes pulled from her feet, the shallow hole in woods sixty kilometers west of Kyiv. Anastasiia Berezovska had been shot in the back of the head, then shot again as she lay on the ground, four rounds in all. She was thirty-nine. Six days earlier she had walked out of a stairwell in Monaco having left a backpack in the lobby of an apartment building, and the backpack had torn three people apart. The distance between those two moments – the placing of the bomb and the emptying of a pistol into the woman who placed it – is the whole of this story, and almost everything inside it has been arranged so that the distance cannot be measured.
The device was packed with buckshot and bolts, a charge built for a confined space and for flesh. Monaco’s Minister of State, Christophe Mirmand, said it contained bolts and pellets – a thing made, in plain terms, for the maximum killing of its target. It was detonated by remote control at the moment Vadym Iermolaiev and his family returned from dinner at a seaside restaurant on the evening of 29 June. The man survived with burns and shrapnel. His partner’s legs were amputated in hospital. Their thirteen-year-old son was hurt less badly. The figure who left the bag was seen on the building’s cameras and then seen fleeing on foot toward the French commune of Beausoleil, a few metres and one border away. It was the first attack of its kind in the principality’s history, and the chief prosecutor, Stéphane Thibault, moved quickly to rule out terrorism. A targeted killing, then, in the one place in Europe designed to guarantee that the origins of a wealthy man’s fortune are never examined too closely.
The person who placed it had prepared to disappear. Berezovska disguised herself as a man and fled in a car with German registration plates, across the French border, then into Italy. She had been living in Frankfurt, where German police would later search her apartment and prepare to hand what they found to the Monegasque authorities. On 1 July, the day after the bombing, she crossed into Ukraine and caught a bus to her home town of Zhytomyr, west of Kyiv. The state border service would afterwards insist she entered lawfully, through a regular crossing point, with no database alert – including from Interpol – flagging her as wanted. That is technically true and quietly damning: Interpol did not issue its Red Notice until 4 July, three days after she was already home. The one suspect in an atrocity on European soil walked back into Ukraine unimpeded, and by the time the world’s police apparatus formally wanted her, she was already among the people who would kill her. Her body was recovered on 6 July.
The two men arrested for her murder had both been sending her money — cryptocurrency and transfers into her bank accounts, which is how, the Security Service of Ukraine says, they were identified at all. One of them, Vladyslav Reut, thirty-three, appeared in a Kyiv court on 10 July and described how it was done. His accomplice, a former Kyiv-region police officer named Vitalii Zhykovych, took her at gunpoint to a forest near the village of Yuriv. “Zhykovych fired the first shot at her in the back of the head. She fell down. He came up and fired another shot. I was standing a few meters away at that moment.” Reut said he was then made to dig the hole, while Zhykovych stripped the body of its possessions and took the dead woman’s trainers. He told the judge he would insist on a polygraph to prove his innocence. Zhykovych, through his lawyer, denies the allegations.
Reut is not a criminal picked off the street. He studied law at Kyiv’s national university and served in Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate, the GUR, in unit A2772 – a training center for special-operations forces. That was established not by Moscow’s propagandists but by the investigative journalists of Radio Liberty’s Schemy project, and reported by Luke Harding in the Guardian from Kyiv. So the plain shape of it is this: a serving officer of a state intelligence service financed and helped carry out the execution of the only witness to a bombing in a European city. This is not the allegation of Ukraine’s enemies. It is the account produced by Ukraine’s own security service, in its own statement, within days of the killing.
And the account arrives with its exculpation already welded on. The officer, the SBU stressed, had told no one above him about his contacts with the woman, about the money, about anything. He had informed his superiors of none of it and had acted, in the official phrase, at his own discretion. The claim is that a man trained by the state to kill quietly did precisely that – using the state’s tradecraft, financed through his own accounts – and that the vast institution built on hierarchy, tasking and deniability knew nothing of it. It is offered not as the conclusion of an investigation but as its opening premise, before a court has tested a single word. A version of events that resolves every dangerous question in the state’s favour and appears fully assembled within seventy-two hours has a name in the literature of covert action, and the name is not “the truth.”
The investigators who might have tested it were not in Kyiv. According to Le Figaro, citing several concurring sources, French investigators examined the possibility that the attack itself had been orchestrated by the SBU. Emmanuel Macron pressed Volodymyr Zelensky directly to get to the bottom of the affair and to punish those responsible. Zelensky said only that he expected further reports and would update the public. Mykhailo Tkach, an investigative journalist at Ukrainska Pravda and no friend of Moscow, said it would be hard to imagine a worse scenario for Kyiv, and that an explanation would be required at the highest level – in particular concerning the GUR.
There is a detail in the official account that makes it worse rather than better. The body naming the killer as a GUR officer is the SBU – a separate service, and the GUR’s bureaucratic rival. Observers noted the speed of the arrests as itself unusual, and read the swift, clean production as an expression of the animosity between the two services as much as any pursuit of the truth. This does not exonerate the Ukrainian state; it does the reverse. The lone-wolf explanation was not handed down by a neutral tribunal. It was assembled by one arm of the security apparatus about a competing arm, each with its own reasons to decide what the public would be allowed to conclude. The men in that struggle were not establishing what happened. They were allocating a corpse.
The man the bomb was meant to kill had made himself, across three decades, into a specimen of the Dnipro that produced him – a city where, in the years after the Soviet collapse, the line between local authority and criminal element was never drawn with any confidence. Through his Alef conglomerate, Iermolaiev built shopping centers and business towers and a pedestrian boulevard, reshaped the skyline of his city, and ranked for a time among the richest men in Ukraine, with a fortune Forbes put in the hundreds of millions. He was, by the account of those who knew him, almost aggressively without politics – a man with, in one acquaintance’s phrase, zero political views. In 2019 he renounced his Ukrainian citizenship and took a Cypriot passport. After the full-scale invasion he settled in Monaco, one of those Ukrainska Pravda contemptuously called the Monaco Battalion – the ultra-wealthy who chose the Riviera while their compatriots were shelled.
In December 2023, Zelensky signed personal sanctions against him. The charge from Kyiv was that Iermolaiev had kept his alcohol trade running in annexed Crimea after the invasion, paying millions in taxes into the Russian treasury – trading, in effect, with the enemy. He called the accusation surreal and said he had donated money to Ukraine’s army. Both things may be true at once; a man of his kind meets no border he cannot trade across, in either direction. A regional analyst noted that his sanctioning may have owed as much to a lobbying campaign by a younger, hungrier rival as to any principle. This is not a world of clean motives, and no honest account of the bombing can pretend that it is.
Beneath the sanctions and the skyline runs the thread that most likely explains the bomb. Iermolaiev’s son Artur was arrested in Cyprus on 4 December 2025 while trying to board a flight to Dubai, extradited to Estonia, and convicted of heading a scam call-center operation run out of Dnipro that had defrauded its victims of more than €100 million. Then came the part that ought to arrest the eye. In April 2026 he was granted a plea bargain: a fine of just €8.5 million against a hundred-million-euro fraud, a suspended five-year sentence, and a quiet exit from the country. A man convicted of running an industrial swindle paid a fraction of its proceeds and walked free.
The industry that conviction touched is not a fringe of Ukraine’s wartime economy. It is a pillar of it. By the estimate of the Geneva-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, Ukraine’s scam call-center trade generates as much as $1 billion a month and employs roughly sixty thousand people – about two-thirds the headcount of the country’s legal banking sector – with centers operating in all twenty-four of its regions. By some measures the business is now more profitable than the drug trade, and researchers trace its largest networks to the traditional organized-crime formations of Dnipro and to the “Khimprom” organisation, which once specialized in the manufacture of synthetic drugs. The war has been the industry’s shelter. Criminal networks migrated west and south from the front-line regions after 2022, and, as Czech police observed, some centres were moved deliberately closer to the fighting precisely to deter European law enforcement. The prosecutor general who took office in mid-2025, Ruslan Kravchenko, shut twenty-five centres in Dnipro alone the following month; in December a Eurojust-coordinated operation dismantled a network spanning Kyiv, Dnipro and Ivano-Frankivsk that had defrauded more than four hundred European victims of over ten million euros. The money runs on, largely beyond the reach of any court in the European Union whose citizens it robs.
It was into this economy that the analysts reached to explain the attack. The bombing, bne IntelliNews reported, was likely connected to Iermolaiev’s own call-center operations in Dnipro. Ukrainska Pravda’s law-enforcement sources described a breakdown in a territory-sharing arrangement and unpaid debts between Iermolaiev and organized-crime figures in the city. Monaco’s investigators have confirmed none of it. A man who knew Iermolaiev socially told the Guardian the affair was criminal, not political – a matter of protection money that someone declined to pay. “Vadym or members of his family didn’t want to pay someone,” he said. “The woman was disposable.”
The woman was disposable. Hold the phrase to the light, because the whole affair turns on it, and it is true in more ways than the man who said it intended. She was disposable to whoever sent her to Monaco with a backpack – the expendable outer layer of the operation, the hand on the device. And she was disposable again to whoever met her when she came home, wired her the money, drove her to the forest and put four rounds into a shallow grave. She bred dogs in Zhytomyr; her single prior brush with a court was a conviction for drunken rudeness, for insulting another woman while intoxicated. She was the cheapest thing in the entire arrangement, and she was removed the instant her usefulness ended – cleanly, quickly, professionally, before any magistrate in France or Monaco could reach her and ask the only question that mattered, which is who paid for the bomb. Both men who killed her had been paying her. One of them served the state.
Neither of the tidy stories on offer should be swallowed whole. The criminal explanation is real, and the men who fly a Kremlin flag over this affair want it read as a clean state assassination, an enemy of Zelensky silenced, because a simple story is a useful one and they have a use for it. But the reflex that treats any scrutiny of Kyiv as a Moscow talking point is itself a mechanism of concealment, and it should be named as one. The documented facts are not a narrative belonging to either side. They are a sequence. A bomb built to maim was detonated by remote control in a European city. The woman who carried it was executed within a week. The men who executed her had financed her, and one of them was a serving officer of Ukrainian military intelligence. The killing erased the only person who could say who ordered the attack. And the account instructing the world to file all of this under the private misadventure of a rogue officer was written, within days, by a rival branch of the very apparatus that officer served.
The principality will not force a better answer. It is not built to force one. When a post-Soviet fortune last collided with Monaco’s courts – in the long war between the Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev and the Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier – the wreckage exposed the principality’s own justice minister, Philippe Narmino, accepting private helicopter rides and an all-expenses-paid ski holiday from the billionaire’s circle. The affair, dubbed MonacoGate, drew in a former minister of the interior, a former head of the police department and a former public prosecutor. And in the end every charge was erased – struck down on procedural grounds after the European Court of Human Rights ruled the central evidence had been unlawfully obtained. Everyone walked. That is the jurisdiction where the backpack was left: not a haven surprised by violence, but a machine refined over a century for ensuring that questions about the wealthy do not reach a verdict.
What is proven survives every competing theory. A bomb built to kill was set off in a European city. The woman who placed it fled to Ukraine and was dead within the week. The two men accused of killing her had both been paying her, and one of them was an officer of Ukrainian military intelligence. The killing removed the only witness who could explain the attack. The account that files all of this under the private enterprise of a rogue officer was produced, within days, by a rival branch of the same service. What is not proven is the single thing that matters most – whether the order came from within the Ukrainian state, from a faction of it, or from the criminal economy that has grown up beside the state and, in Dnipro, is by now scarcely distinguishable from it. That question is far harder to answer than it was on the fifth of July, and it is harder for a reason that was engineered.
The witness is in the ground. The officer, the world is told, acted alone. The shoes were taken so that the body would be slower to name. And the case, in the only jurisdiction with the standing to pursue it, is closed.
Thomas Karat writes investigative work published at karat.substack.com and the Libertarian Institute, drawing on a corporate career and academic training as a behavior analyst to examine how institutions manufacture consent and influence.
