When the blast went off, Vadym Yermolaiev’s mind went blank. For a split second, he thought his electronic keys might have exploded in his hand. But then he saw his partner splayed out on the steps, wounded. His 13-year old son waving his bloodied arms. Panic set in.
On Monday June 29, a bomb exploded on the doorstep of Yermolaiev’s luxury apartment in Monaco , gravely injuring the Ukrainian millionaire and shocking residents of the wealthy city state.
The suspect, initially described by investigators as a “male” in a “black bucket hat,” vanished. Three days later, the person authorities in multiple countries now say was the attacker was revealed to be Anastasiia Berezovska – a Ukrainian woman with a large snake tattoo on her arm.
She had no criminal record, no known link to Yermolaiev, and no obvious motive. A week after authorities said she planting the bomb, the 39-year-old single mother was found dead , buried in a shallow grave in a forest near Kyiv.
By retracing Berezovska’s footsteps, finding witnesses and hearing from one of the men accused of killing her, CNN has uncovered a tale of violence, strange twists and unanswered questions.
The biggest – why anyone would want to kill him – is a question Yermolaiev has been asking himself for weeks now. In his first face-to-face interview since the attack, only days after being released from hospital following multiple surgeries, Yermolaiev told CNN he is struggling to point a finger at anyone.
“I’ve never had enemies. I’m not a confrontational person. I’ve always tried to avoid any sharp conflicts. I don’t understand the reason,” he said.
Sources close to the Ukrainian investigation told CNN they believe Berezovska was most likely a foot soldier motivated by money – although they declined to speculate on who might have been the ultimate mastermind behind the plot.
Nonetheless, it appears she planned the attack meticulously, managing to flee across multiple borders to Ukraine before the authorities even realized they were looking for a woman.
Before the bombing, Berezovska was living as a refugee in Hofheim, a small town near Frankfurt in Germany. Divorced from her first husband, separated from the second and with a seven-year-old son, she seemed to have struggled with money. Court documents show that in 2022, around the time of her departure for Germany, she sued her second husband – a man 30 years her senior – for alimony.
Apart from a drunken brawl in Ukraine a few years ago, which resulted in no charges, she was not known to the authorities.
According to Ukrainian media reports, she sent her son to Ukraine several weeks before she traveled to Monaco. Once there, she scouted the location of the attack, stalking her intended victim, the Ukrainian-born businessman Yermolaiev, according to authorities in the principality.
Prosecutors said CCTV caught her pausing in front of Yermolaiev’s home on several occasions between June 26 – the day of her 39th birthday – and the bombing three days later.
The footage shows Berezovska disguised herself as she conducted her reconnaissance, wearing the bucket hat that covered her shoulder-length dark hair, a baggy hoodie and loose trousers. However, on one occasion, she wore her regular clothes and revealed her face and prominent tattoo – a choice Monaco’s investigators say enabled them to identify her as the suspect.
Yermolaiev has lived in the glitzy city state on the Mediterranean coast for several years, having left Ukraine and renounced his Ukrainian citizenship in 2019 to become a citizen of Cyprus.
He made his fortune in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro during the wild, post-Soviet years. He was mostly focused on real estate and was, at one point, ranked among the richest Ukrainians. He was sanctioned by Kyiv in December 2023 for doing business in Russian-occupied Crimea, an allegation he denies.
His oldest son Artur Yermolaiev, however, is a known figure in the Ukrainian criminal scene. He was arrested in Cyprus over allegations he was the ringleader of a sprawling fraud scheme and extradited to Estonia.
According to Estonian court documents, he pled guilty in April to creating and running a phone scam through which some 100 million euros ($114 million) was stolen from victims in multiple European countries. He was sentenced to five years in prison, but reached a deal under which he was deported from Estonia after serving only four months and paying a fine of 8.5 million euros.
Yermolaiev told CNN his son took the deal because he wanted to avoid a lengthy court process – and that he still believes Artur to be innocent. As for himself, Yermolaiev says he has nothing to do with the scam network. And Monaco’s authorities said that given the level of surveillance Berezovska conducted on Yermolaiev in Monaco, it is clear he was the intended target.
“I don’t even know how to use a computer, I can only use a phone,” he told CNN. He is equally confident in rejecting another theory put to him – that someone from his family ordered the hit.
“It actually struck me as almost funny,” he said, adding that most of his wealth is already registered in the names of other family members. “It’s out of the question.”
Ukrainian authorities say that on the evening of the attack, Berezovska filmed herself using a camera hidden on the street – and the investigators were later able to recover the footage even though it had been deleted. Ukraine’s prosecutor general said she filmed it to “prove the execution of the order.”
Monaco’s prosecutors say she sat on a bench two streets away, waiting for the Yermolaiev family to finish dinner at a nearby restaurant.
The video, released by Ukraine’s prosecutor general, clearly shows a person in a black bucket hat, a lose dark jumper and a large white tote bag, walking up the street and placing a black backpack on the doorstep of Yermolaiev’s home. The person, identified by authorities as Berezovska, then walks away, reaching into her pocket for a phone.
The millionaire and his family can be seen rounding a bend in the street just yards behind her.
Exactly 20 seconds after dropping off the backpack, the figure in the bucket hat turns her head to look back. Immediately after that, a powerful blast rips through the street. The bomber picks up the hidden camera attached to something across the street and runs.
Monaco’s Police Commissioner Eric Arella told CNN 250 police officers were mobilized within hours of the bombing. At the same time, a team of 70 investigators started combing through CCTV cameras looking for the bomber.
But Monaco authorities said Berezovska was gone. First, she crossed into France, just a few streets away. According to the Monaco investigators, she drove a rental car through Italy and other European countries to Frankfurt, where the vehicle was found abandoned by German police.
Berezovska then took a bus back to Ukraine via Poland, according to the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine. She crossed the border on Wednesday, July 1, before she’d been flagged as a suspect.
It wasn’t until a day later that the authorities in Monaco managed to identify her and charged her with attempted murder, among other charges. According to Stéphane Thibault, Monaco’s top prosecutor, the state issued an international arrest warrant and notified Interpol late on Thursday evening.
Hours later, Berezovska’s name and photo were everywhere.
Once in Ukraine, Berezovska went straight home, to Horodyshche, according to Ukrainian prosecutors, a village near the city of Zhytomyr in central Ukraine where she was born in 1987.
Her mother still lives there, and it’s where she sent her son before traveling to Monaco.
The village, which is only reachable by a dirt road, has a few dozen homes lining unpaved streets and a small shop where locals gather to play cards. Berezovska’s family home sits on its edge, next to sprawling fields. On a recent Saturday, freshly laundered washing hung in the yard, a child’s bicycle lying beside a swing in the garden. Berezovska’s son and mother appeared to be at home but did not answer the door.
The neighbors told CNN they were shocked by the recent news. Vitaliy, only three years older than Berezovska, said he grew up in Horodyshche and went to the same school as her.
Asking CNN not to publish his last name, he said he had nothing bad to say about her.
“People spoke well of her. As for what happened (in Monaco) – only she and God know,” Vitaly said. “I don’t even know what to tell you. It seems to me that she was set up.”
Mykola, another local resident who preferred not to give his last name, said he felt sorry for Berezovska – whom he called by her nickname, Nastya. He had a hard time comprehending the allegations made against her, recalling how they used to swim in the local pond in summer.
“Maybe she planted it or maybe others did… do you believe that? Could that happen? Maybe! Why would she even plant an explosive?” he asked.
On the morning of Friday, July 3, as news began to spread that a suspect had been identified in the Monaco attack, Berezovska asked her mother to drive her from Horodyshche to a nearby gas station.
According to court documents, Berezovska asked the gas station staff to call her a taxi, then showed the driver a GPS location along the highway to Kyiv. Prosecutors say this was a location given to her by her alleged accomplices. The taxi driver told investigators Berezovska did not speak during the 30-minute ride, paid the roughly $45 fare and got out.
According to the prosecutors, she was then picked up by a black BMW.
Inside the luxury car were Berezovska’s two alleged accomplices – Vladyslav Reut and Vitaliy Zhykovych. Ukrainian prosecutors have said both Zhykovych and Reut were communicating with Berezovska in the months leading up to the attack and made several cryptocurrency payments and bank transfers to her. According to Zhykovych’s lawyer, these amounted to between 6,000 and 7,000 euros in total.
The lawyer, Anatoliy Ivanov, told CNN his client believed he was working on a secret mission for the Ukrainian intelligence services – a claim denied by Ukrainian officials.
In another twist in this extraordinary story, Reut was a serving officer in the Ukrainian Defense Intelligence Service (GUR) at the time of the Monaco bombing. He admitted to participating in Berezovska’s murder, although he said in court that he acted without the knowledge of his superiors, and the agency denied any involvement. Zhykovych, meanwhile, is a former law enforcement employee who previously worked as a volunteer officer for Ukraine’s Security Service, and who, according to investigators, had a room “resembling a torture chamber” in the basement of his home.
A video released by the prosecutors shows a dungeon-like room with a large plastic sheet on the floor, several axes, and what appears to be a hood.
Zhykovych’s lawyer told CNN that the idea the room was a torture chamber was “utter nonsense” and that the basement was used as a shelter during attacks.
Yermolaiev told CNN he is skeptical of any suggestion that the Ukrainian state could have officially ordered his assassination. He said Reut was likely a “bad apple” operating on his own, motivated by money.
“I can’t even imagine that being the case,” he said, adding that he believes someone privately hired Reut and Zhykovych for their expertise in covert operations and attacks. “ Identifying who ordered it, that’s the main question today.”
Precisely what happened after Berezovska, Reut and Zhykovych met by the highway is unclear — each of the two men have given their own version of the story. But by the end of the day, Berezovska was dead.
During his pre-trial hearing in Kyiv, Reut said Zhykovych had called him that Friday morning, asking Reut to pick him up near the Ukrainian capital.
Reut said Zhykovych initially told him that Berezovska was at risk of “physical harm from third parties” and needed to be “hidden.” However, once on their way, Reut said, Zhykovych reached into his backpack and pulled out a gun – telling Reut he had brought it only in case Berezovska “started to panic or behave in a way that made it impossible to deal with her.”
Reut told the court that Berezovska was nervous and distressed when she climbed into the car. He said Zhykovych instructed him to drive towards the forest near the village of Yuriv, where they got out. There, in the woods, Berezovska was shot in the head multiple times.
After his arrest, Reut initially confessed to shooting Berezovska on Zhykovych’s orders, according to Ukrainian prosecutors. Later, in court, he claimed it was Zhykovych who pulled the trigger. Zhykovych’s lawyer, Anatoliy Ivanov, dismissed the allegations, telling CNN that Reut was the organizer and killer and was seeking to shift the blame onto Zhykovych.
Ivanov said his client believed he was helping Reut with a secret mission for Ukrainian intelligence agencies – a task that Ukrainian intelligence officials deny existed. GUR said in a statement that it assisted other Ukrainian law enforcement authorities in detaining the two suspects and was committed to the investigation.
The lawyer added that according to Zhykovych, Berezovska conducted several tasks for the two men, gathering information on people of interest to them.
The lawyer who represented Reut during his first court hearing no longer represents him and refused to comment to CNN on the case. It is not clear if Reut has a new lawyer – CNN was not able to reach anyone.
Reut told the court he and Zhykovych dug a hole – with a shovel he had in his car – and buried Berezovska. He said the two men then threw the gun and Berezovska’s possessions, including two cell phones, a lighter and a watch, into a nearby lake and burned her money and documents.
Ukrainian authorities recovered Berezovska’s body three days later, having been led to her makeshift grave by Reut after he was tracked down by investigators.
There is one freshly dug grave at the cemetery in Horodyshche.. Large flower arrangements lie on the pile of earth; a traditional embroidered cloth drapes over the cross. Beneath is a photo of the deceased: Anastasiia Berezovska.
She is smiling, her blue eyes looking directly into the camera, black hair framing her face. She looks nothing like the photo on Interpol’s arrest warrant.
Yermolaiev told CNN that thinking about Berezovska, the woman who allegedly nearly killed him and caused life-changing injuries to his partner, he feels emptiness.
“She wasn’t the main player in this story,” he said. “I think she was simply a foolish, naive operative who was told, in some way, that she was doing something important, something great.”
He said he believed she was killed so that she couldn’t testify against others. “For Berezovska alone to have surveilled me for four months and organized all of that on the ground by herself, that’s not realistic.”
Berezovska’s coffin remained closed during the funeral – an unusual decision in Ukraine. Vitaly, the neighbor from Horodyshche, said Berezovska’s mother was inconsolable during the service, which was attended by many.
“Her mom was crying really hard and said, ‘Daughter, what have you done?’ Those were her mother’s words at the grave. Her mother was crying a lot and kept saying, ‘What have you done?’”
CNN’s Victoria Butenko, Olga Voitovich, Darya Tarasova, Stephanie Halasz, Pierre Bairin, Niamh Kennedy and Surya Vaidy contributed to this report.
