A "Terror Attack" Straight Out of a Script: The Yermolaiev Case and the Information War Against Ukraine
High-profile crimes committed by Ukrainians abroad increasingly look like pieces of a single hybrid campaign. Every time, Russian propaganda seizes on these cases to undermine Ukraine's international standing.
Crimes with a screenplay-worthy plot
On June 29, Monaco was rocked, in every sense, by an assassination attempt on Vadym Yermolaiev, a sanctioned Ukrainian oligarch. That evening, an explosion went off in one of the principality's most exclusive neighborhoods — an incident without precedent in the tiny state's history. An improvised explosive device detonated next to a residential building, wounding the businessman, his common-law partner and his 13-year-old son.
What followed, and is still unfolding, reads like a fast-paced thriller. Monaco police went looking for a man who had planted a backpack with a bomb hidden inside. The suspect then turned out to be a woman: 39-year-old Ukrainian national Anastasia Berezovska, a resident of Germany, who had disguised herself as a man while surveilling the businessman.
The alleged perpetrator was placed on an international wanted list, but on July 6 her body was found buried in the Makariv district of Kyiv region, with a gunshot wound to the head. It emerged that she had crossed into Ukraine legally back on July 1. Suspects in her murder were detained almost immediately: a serving officer of the Main Intelligence Directorate (HUR) and a "former law enforcement officer" (who turned out to be an ex-SBU employee). One of them has reportedly already confessed.
Such rapid progress fits a movie script perfectly but bears little resemblance to a real investigation, says Vasyl Vovk, former head of the Main Investigation Department of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), making no secret of his astonishment: "Everything is moving very fast — new facts, new stories, new twists. The plot keeps thickening, and I'm sure it will thicken further. I can't recall an investigation moving this quickly, either in my own career or in that of my colleagues."
A natural question follows: where, then, are the directors and screenwriters? To find the answer, it helps to remember that the attack on Yermolaiev is not the first episode of this series. Over the past year to eighteen months, there have been at least several high-profile criminal cases involving murders of, or attempts on, prominent Ukrainians abroad. On May 21 last year, Andriy Portnov, former head of President Yanukovych's administration, was shot dead in an upscale Madrid neighborhood. And in February of this year, the country was shaken by the abduction and brutal murder in Bali of Ihor Komarov, son of businessman Serhiy Komarov. In every case, both the victims and the suspects (in the Komarov case, most of the suspects) are Ukrainian citizens, current or former (Yermolaiev renounced his Ukrainian passport in 2019). In every case, the setting is a quiet, peaceful corner of the world where the wealthy live and brutal violence is something out of the ordinary.
An even more important similarity: all of these cases have been, and continue to be, exploited by Russian and pro-Russian propagandists to create a negative international information backdrop around Ukraine. In the Yermolaiev case, a planted story began circulating in obscure French media immediately after the incident, citing "anonymous sources": European investigators were supposedly treating the involvement of Ukrainian intelligence services as their leading theory.
Right on cue came "insider information" from a "former French intelligence agent": Yermolaiev had allegedly been preparing a "report to the European Parliament on corruption in Ukraine" — the implication being that the Ukrainian authorities wanted him silenced. And that was only the opening move of a large-scale information and psychological campaign.
Within a day of the attack, more than 150 posts had appeared on social media and in fringe European outlets accusing Ukraine of "state terrorism." European audiences were fed a simple message: "while we're helping Kyiv, Ukrainians are setting off bombs in our cities." Running through it all is the claim that the Ukrainian government and its security services are unhinged — that Ukraine is not a state but a criminal syndicate gone rogue. The information effect of these events, it seems, has become more important than the events themselves.
How the psyop works
Similar information campaigns spring up every time Ukrainians abroad become party (whether as victims or suspects) to a high-profile crime. Social media and regional outlets pore over the lurid details, and theories emerge implicating the Ukrainian authorities or individuals Moscow finds inconvenient. It is logical to conclude that all of these cases are elements of a single campaign — one that is well planned and well coordinated.
Its primary goal is not so much to physically eliminate or discredit particular people as to erode trust in the Ukrainian state, its institutions and its society. That matters especially now, as Ukraine pushes for the opening of EU accession negotiation clusters while asking its allies for resources to bolster its air defenses — all against the backdrop of deteriorating relations with neighboring Poland, which has threatened to block Ukraine's path to the EU.
The campaign's talking points are plainly visible in Russian television propaganda. A textbook example is a July 1 report on the Monaco attack by the propaganda channel Izvestia. Tellingly, its authors push several mutually contradictory "versions" of the crime at once: "Zelensky is eliminating political opponents," "Ukrainian intelligence services have gone rogue," "support for Ukraine is backfiring on Europeans." Just as notable, however, is that one of the main targets of the attack is neither the Ukrainian state itself, nor even the leadership of the Defense Ministry's intelligence directorate, but businessman Oleksandr Petrovskyi.
The propagandists make no secret of their motives for going after him: the Izvestia segment opens with a landmark event in Istanbul — the granting of the Tomos of Autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine on January 6, 2019. Visible in photos from that historic day is Oleksandr Petrovskyi, who had earlier served as a delegate to the Unification Council of Ukraine's Orthodox churches and, according to media reports, played an active role in negotiations with the Ecumenical Patriarchate over the granting of the Tomos. The Russian presenter introduces him to viewers in exactly those terms: "The man who brought the Tomos to Ukraine — the document that split the Orthodox Church."
Two years ago, Petrovskyi came up in a similar context in a propaganda film aired by the Russian channel Zvezda (part of the Russian defense ministry's media holding), which accused him of "bribing" Ukraine's fifth president, Petro Poroshenko — the head of state had supposedly received $30 million for lobbying for the Tomos. Later, attempts were made to link Petrovskyi's name to the abduction of Ihor Komarov in Bali.
In short, propagandists will deliberately write individual Ukrainian figures into high-profile storylines — and whether those people actually have anything to do with the events is beside the point. What matters is planting the right associations in the audience's mind.
Turf wars in law enforcement
One further point deserves attention: in waging its information and psychological campaign, the enemy is skillfully exploiting internal problems within Ukraine's security agencies. The Yermolaiev case, in particular, has exposed an unhealthy rivalry between individual law enforcement bodies. One suspect in Berezovska's murder was immediately identified in official statements as a "serving HUR officer," while the second, a former police officer and SBU employee, was described merely as a "former law enforcement officer."
There is every likelihood that enemy agents remain embedded in Ukraine's security services. Just a few weeks ago, SBU Colonel Dmytro Kozyura, former chief of staff of the service's Anti-Terrorist Center, was sentenced to life in prison as a recruited Russian mole. Traitors will no doubt continue to be uncovered, but hostile agent networks will remain a component of the information-psychological campaign — one of its secondary aims being to sow chaos by turning Ukrainian security agencies against one another.
The enemy's ultimate objective is obvious: to discredit Ukraine in the eyes of its Western partners, weaken trust in the Ukrainian state, and obstruct continued military, political and European support. These events should therefore be treated not as isolated criminal incidents but as a critical national security challenge — and answered accordingly.