Interpol names Ukrainian woman in Monaco bombing probe

Interpol has identified Anastasiia Berezovska, a 39-year-old Ukrainian woman, as the main suspect in Monaco’s bombing probe, after prosecutors issued an arrest warrant and the agency circulated a Red Notice. Monaco’s prosecutor, Stéphane Thibault, said the quick identification was made possible by international police and judicial cooperation, underscoring how fast the case crossed borders.

The explosion tore through the entrance hall of a residential building in central Monaco at about 9 p.m. on Monday, June 29, 2026, injuring three people, a couple and a 13-year-old child. Monaco authorities are treating the blast as attempted murder, and Thibault said, to his knowledge, it was the first such attack in the principality’s history. Prince Albert II called it a heinous crime and said it shocked the Monegasque community.

The suspected target is widely reported to be Vadym Yermolaiev, a Ukrainian-born businessman and oligarch who became a Cypriot national and moved to Monaco in 2021. Yermolaiev was sanctioned by Ukraine in December 2023 over business activities in Russian-annexed Crimea, where Kyiv says he kept doing business and paying taxes to Moscow after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. In Dnipro, he has been linked to the opening of the Most-City complex in 2006 and to a business profile that earned him the nickname “Mr Shopping Mall.”

The case has become more than a violent episode in a wealthy enclave on the Mediterranean. French officials have been working to find the suspect, who is believed to have fled, and investigators think she may have traveled on to Germany. French media have also reported that she may have disguised herself as a man, though Monaco prosecutors have not formally confirmed that detail. France 24 said three investigating judges have been assigned, a sign that the investigation is now moving through a formal judicial track as well as an international police one.

That combination of Monaco, Interpol and a Russia-linked Ukrainian businessman points to a wider pattern seen across Europe since the sanctions wave and the war in Ukraine: private wealth, exile politics and law-enforcement cooperation now overlap in the same case file. In Monaco, where security concerns are usually framed around luxury and discretion, the blast has forced prosecutors, police and foreign agencies into the same room over a crime that reached far beyond the Riviera.