A backpack bomber targeted Ukrainian real estate mogul and online scammer Vadym Yermolaiev in Monaco yesterday in the principality’s first ever terrorist attack.

No one was killed, but seven people were injured and Yermolaiev’s wife had both her legs amputated as a result of the blast. CCTV footage showed a black clad man running from the scene who was tracked until he disappeared into France.

Speculation is roiling as to the motive of the attack. Yermolaiev made his money in Dnipro real estate before leaving the country a decade ago and giving up his Ukrainian citizenship for a Cypriot passport. His personal fortune is reportedly worth $220mn. Various Ukrainian business interests and funding of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s political opponents have been suggested as a motive, but there is no evidence as yet of who was behind this attack.

Another possibility is the attack was related to the number of call centres Yermolaiev runs in Dnipro that target EU pensioners and other vulnerable groups with online scams to rob them of their money. These criminal conmen attempt to fraudulently coerce payments or steal bank and credit card data from unsuspecting punters in what is reportedly a multi-million-dollar business out of the reach of EU police and courts.

Some reports have linked the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) to the attack, and the security agency, which is under the direct control of the president, has a record of assassinating its enemies on foreign soil. Darya, the daughter of “Putin’s brain”, philosopher Alexander Dugin, was killed by a car bomb in Russia in August 2022. It is widely assumed the bomb was intended for her father, the car’s owner, in an attack widely blamed on the SBU and publicly condemned by the US as it smacked too much of terrorism.

Prominent Russian military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky was killed by a bomb blast in a St Petersburg cafe in April 2023 in the second assassination on Russian soil of a prominent pro-Russia media figure. Located in the heart of the city, the explosion shocked Russians as the war suddenly arrived in the homeland that has largely been insulated from the conflict until then.

In another incident of increased attacks on military figures, Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, head of Russia’s Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Defence Forces (NBC) was killed in an explosion outside his apartment building in southeastern Moscow in December 2024 In that case the SBU publicly acknowledged being responsible. A scooter packed with explosives was detonated remotely near the building’s entrance at around 4am as Kirillov came out and suggested careful planning and monitoring of Kirillov’s movements. Several more Russian generals were killed by bombs or shot around the Moscow region during 2025.

The list goes on. There have been a total of at least a dozen high profile assassinations or attempted assassinations of Russian figures that have been linked to Ukrainian special operations outside of Ukraine, according to IntelliNews estimates.

If you include killings of Russian officials in Ukrainian territories under Russian control then some studies and media databases have catalogued 30–50 targeted attacks in occupied territories alone during 2022–24, many carried out by Ukrainian special services or partisan groups, although concrete attribution is almost always uncertain. As a rule, neither the SBU nor Bankova comment on assassinations.

Russia is not above assassinating its enemies. The most famous case is the death by polonium of Alexander Litvinenko in London. A former FSB operative who was working for oligarch Boris Berezovsky in London. According to one version of the story, a hard core clique of FSB generals saw Litvinenko as a traitor and decided to take him out. The use of polonium, which can only be sourced from Russia military institutions, was deliberate and intended as a message to other “traitors.”

More recently, Maxim Kuzminov, a Ukrainian helicopter pilot who deserted and handed his Mi-8 AMTSh machine over to the Russians in exchange for a half a million-dollar reward, was assassinated at a luxury villa near Alicante on Spain's Costa Blanca this February. He was shot multiple times before reportedly his attackers drove over his body before fleeing in a car that was later found burned out. Spanish investigators have never publicly identified the perpetrators, but it widely assumed it was the GRU (Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces military intelligence). Other famous cases include the ex-spy Sergei Skripal who defected to the UK and opposition figure Alexei Navalny, who died in prison last year in suspicious circumstances.

Political assassinations is still a thing in both countries. Numerous senior Russian oil industry figures have died in strange circumstances in the last years. In Ukraine there was a wave of suicides among former Yanukovych allies in 2015, including Stanislav Melnyk and Oleksandr Peklushenko, who were both found shot dead. Oleksandr Muzychko, a Ukrainian nationalist and Right Sector figure close to Yanukovych, who died during a police operation near Rivne in March 2014, shortly after Yanukovych was ousted. According to the official version he died by accidently shooting himself twice during a showdown with police.

The public evidence varies considerably from case to case. Some operations have been openly acknowledged by Ukraine, others have been widely attributed by Western intelligence or media, while others remain allegations by Russia without independent verification. Mysterious murders or defenestrations are often blamed not on Ukraine, but the Kremlin itself further muddying the waters.

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