Anastasiia Berezovska, the woman wanted over the June 30 parcel-bomb attack in Monaco, was found shot dead near Kyiv with a gunshot wound to the head, Ukrainian prosecutors said Tuesday. Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) reported that its personnel discovered the body Fox40/AP. Prosecutors simultaneously announced the arrests of two men in connection with the case: a serving officer of Ukraine's HUR military intelligence directorate and a former law enforcement officer The Guardian.

Interpol had issued a red notice for the 39-year-old on Friday, July 3, naming her in connection with charges Monegasque authorities have brought: attempted murder, placing an explosive device in a public place with criminal intent, and criminal conspiracy. The notice arrived four days before her body surfaced, compressing an already fast-moving case into a single week.

The underlying attack struck the entrance hall of an apartment building in Monaco on June 30. French prosecutors allege Berezovska, disguised as a man, placed the device that wounded Vadym Iermolaiev, a 58-year-old Ukraine-born businessman holding Cypriot citizenship, along with his girlfriend and their son. Iermolaiev and his partner were hospitalized with serious injuries; the child's injuries were minor. Prince Albert II of Monaco called the bombing an odious act and said all of the principality's security services had been mobilized in its aftermath.

Ukrainian prosecutors say Berezovska received cryptocurrency payments from the two men now in custody, which investigators cite as the basis for treating them as potentially involved in the Monaco attempt. The serving HUR officer, according to prosecutors, acted on his own initiative and did not disclose his contacts with Berezovska to superiors — a detail that, if it holds up, would place the operation outside any sanctioned chain of command rather than inside one. Searches of the arrested men's properties turned up a blood-stained torture chamber containing hammers and other equipment, footage of which prosecutors released.

Berezovska was a Ukrainian national who spoke German and had been living in Germany, adding a third jurisdiction — alongside Monaco and Ukraine — with potential investigative interest in how she moved, communicated, and was ultimately tracked down.

The victim's own history complicates any simple reading of motive. Ukraine sanctioned Iermolaiev in 2023 over alleged business links to Russian entities operating in occupied Ukrainian territory, including Crimea. He had been living in Monaco among a cluster of wealthy Ukrainian businessmen and politicians that independent Ukrainian media have dubbed the "Monaco battalion." That a state-sanctioned Ukrainian businessman was targeted, allegedly with the involvement of a Ukrainian intelligence officer acting outside his chain of command, sets up a case that could be read as freelance criminal contract work, as an unauthorized intelligence operation, or as something in between — and Ukrainian prosecutors have not yet offered a motive that resolves the ambiguity.

The timing of Tuesday's disclosures is difficult to separate from the wider diplomatic calendar. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrived at a NATO summit the same day prosecutors announced Berezovska's death, though the sources reviewed here do not establish any direct link between the summit and the timing of the announcement. Ukrainian security institutions operate under close scrutiny from Western partners already wary of any suggestion that state actors have been involved in extraterritorial violence; the disclosure of an active HUR officer's arrest, on the day Ukraine's president stood before allied leaders, will draw attention regardless of whether the two events are connected.

Several threads remain open. Berezovska's death removes the principal suspect from any future Monegasque or French prosecution, leaving the two Ukrainian detainees — and whatever cryptocurrency trail connects them to her — as the primary avenue for establishing who ordered the attack and why. Prosecutors have not said whether her death is being treated as murder, suicide, or something else, though a gunshot wound to the head found near Kyiv, arriving within days of an Interpol red notice, invites scrutiny into whether she was killed to prevent testimony. French and Monegasque authorities, who brought the original charges, will presumably seek cooperation from Kyiv on evidence gathered in the searches, including the torture-chamber material, as they build a case against a suspect who can no longer be extradited or questioned.

The broader question is what a serving HUR officer was doing corresponding with a suspect in a European bombing without informing his own chain of command, and whether Ukraine's account — that he acted alone — survives further investigation. Intelligence services operating in wartime conditions inevitably generate rogue actors and freelance arrangements that blur the line between sanctioned and unsanctioned activity; distinguishing between the two, in this case, will matter far beyond Monaco's borders.