The Botched Oligarch Assassination In Monaco Turned Into A Reputational Disaster For Ukraine

The culprit’s killing by her own handlers discredits Ukraine’s military-intelligence agency GUR in the eyes of its agents and future assets alike, who might now consider defecting and not cooperating with them due to the fear that they too could be killed after a mission as part of a cover-up.

Interpol earlier put out a red notice for Anastasia Berezovskaya in connection with the recently botched assassination of a Ukrainian oligarch in Monaco. The remotely detonated bomb failed to kill Vadim Ermolaev, but it did injure him, his wife, and their teenage son in the first terrorist attack in the principality’s history. He runs over 170 scam centers in Ukraine and is an enemy of Zelensky, whose corruption he was reportedly planning to expose at the European Parliament per a former French spy.

As it turns out, none other than Ukraine’s secret police reported that Berezovskaya was killed after returning to Ukraine, and the suspects are a former cop and a serving member of Ukraine’s military-intelligence agency GUR. The SBU also claimed that the latter made payments to her that he didn’t inform his agency of, thus implying that he went rogue. That’s the least believable scenario, however, since it conveniently exculpates Kiev after widespread European outrage over its botched assassination.

What’s much more likely is that GUR orchestrated Ermolaev’s assassination on Zelensky’s orders, decided to kill Berezovskaya after she failed to take him out, and then betrayed the two suspects afterwards as part of a cover-up for protecting Kiev’s reputation amidst the abovementioned outrage. Even if she killed Ermolaev, she herself would have probably still been killed by GUR too after sloppily leaving enough evidence for Interpol to quickly implicate her and thus the Ukrainian State by extension.

Had she killed him and not left such evidence, and Interpol couldn’t connect the crime to the Ukrainian State, then she’d probably still be alive (at least for now). Be that as it may, the sequence of events that played out in reality turned into a reputational disaster for Ukraine. It was already touched upon how the first terrorist attack in Monaco’s history prompted widespread European outrage, especially since its elite vacation and even live there, but the real damage was to GUR’s recruitment capabilities.

Regardless of whatever one thinks about Berezovskaya and what she did, she was working for them and carried out her mission (albeit imperfectly and sloppily) with the expectation of a financial reward and being allowed to live out the rest of her life after returning to Ukraine, but she was instead killed by her own handlers. It’s unimportant in this context why they killed her, just that her murder at their hands will make GUR agents and future assets alike respectively consider defecting and not cooperating with them.

By contrast, Russians have a well-known saying, “Русские своих не бросают”, which translates to “Russians don’t abandon their own” (formally “Russians don’t throw out their own”). Even in those well-known alleged spy scandals in Europe that implicated Russian agents in the past, Russia would never have thought to kill one of their own like Ukraine just did. Being much more experienced than their Ukrainian counterparts, Russia’s intelligence services knew that would forever harm their recruitment.

Ukraine could have just had her “disappear” but instead wanted to reveal to the world that she was killed by what the SBU implied to be a rogue GUR agent, thus hoping that Europe would thus move on from this scandal, perhaps even believing that Ukraine is “finally fighting corruption” unlike before. Even in the event that Europe reacts that way, it wouldn’t invalidate the fact that GUR just discredited itself in its agents’ and future assets’ eyes, which could respectively lead to defections and less cooperation.