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.
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