Monaco issued an Interpol Red Notice on Thursday, July 3, for a woman authorities suspect of planting the parcel bomb that wounded Ukrainian oligarch Vadym Yermolaiev, his partner and their 13-year-old son outside their Monaco apartment building on the evening of June 29. A judicial source in the principality told Reuters the suspect had been spotted in Germany. An arrest warrant was issued on Thursday, and Monaco’s prosecutor general’s office said it had formally opened a judicial investigation into the attack, appointing three investigating judges who now hold broad powers including authority over international legal cooperation.
The attack shattered what Monaco’s minister of state Christophe Mirmand described as an unbroken record of safety. “This is the first time in history, to my knowledge, that such an act has taken place in the principality,” Mirmand told French broadcaster LCI.
Surveillance cameras captured a figure leaving a bag at the entrance of the residential building on Rue du Révérend Père Louis Frolla, near the French border, shortly before the explosion at around 9pm. Authorities initially described the suspect as male, based on CCTV images showing a person wearing a dark bucket hat and top. By Thursday, judicial sources had revised that assessment, telling Reuters they now believe the bomber is a woman. Monaco Prosecutor General Stéphane Thibault said on Tuesday that the suspect appeared to have acted alone and that the attack was not classified as terrorism.
Yermolaiev’s partner, Anna Innokentiivna Yermolaeva, lost both legs below the knee in the explosion, according to Ukrainska Pravda, which cited sources familiar with her medical treatment in Nice. Yermolaiev himself sustained burns and shrapnel injuries but is described as conscious and in a stable condition. His 13-year-old son David was also wounded. Two passersby were caught in the blast as well. The device contained bolts and buckshot, Mirmand told LCI.
Monaco’s Prince Albert II condemned the attack as an “odious act” and said all of the principality’s security services had been mobilized in coordination with French authorities. Because Monaco has no active border controls with France, the suspect crossed into the neighboring commune of Beausoleil on foot immediately after the explosion. A major cross-border manhunt involving both Monegasque and French police followed. A foreign national was arrested in Monaco on Wednesday morning on suspicion of being involved, held for several hours of police questioning, and then released, Euronews reported, without further identification or explanation.
France’s Le Figaro newspaper reported earlier in the week that investigators were examining the theory that Ukraine’s Security Service, known as the SBU, had directed the attack against Yermolaiev. The SBU and Ukrainian government officials had not responded publicly to that claim by the time of publication.
Who is Vadym Yermolaiev?
Yermolaiev, 57, made his fortune in Dnipro, an industrial city in south-central Ukraine, beginning in the early 1990s, when he traded consumer goods imported from Bulgaria and Turkey. His Alef Group grew to encompass real estate, construction, agriculture, logistics, alcohol production and dental implant manufacturing, accumulating a fortune Forbes estimated at $220 million to $230 million by 2020 and 2021, the years in which the magazine listed him as one of Ukraine’s wealthiest people.
His fall from favour stemmed from his Crimean wine businesses. Yermolaiev owned three Crimean wineries before Russia annexed the peninsula in 2014. Investigators and Ukrainian media alleged that alcohol firms associated with him were re-registered under Russian law after the annexation and continued to pay taxes into Russia’s federal budget even after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, effectively financing the war effort. Yermolaiev denied collaborating with Russia. “We tried to recover our investments but to no avail,” he told RBC Ukraine in 2024, adding that by the end of 2015 he had abandoned efforts to reclaim them and that the companies had been seized by Russian forces in 2023.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky imposed sanctions on Yermolaiev and companies linked to him in December 2023. Yermolaiev had already renounced his Ukrainian citizenship in 2019 and holds a Cypriot passport. He told Forbes Ukraine he sought “international protection” because Ukraine’s judicial and tax systems were, in his words, “not ideal.” He has lived in Monaco since 2021, driving a Bentley Flying Spur worth around $300,000, according to Ukrainska Pravda.
His legal difficulties are not confined to his own case. His son Artur was detained in Cyprus in 2025 and extradited to Estonia, where he faces charges of organizing a criminal group that ran fraudulent investment call centres in Ukraine between 2019 and 2022, earning more than €100 million, of which €5.4 million came from Estonian residents.
Ryhor Nizhnikau, a specialist in Ukrainian affairs at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, told France 24 that Yermolaiev was “a very typical oligarch from the 1990s” who had been one of the top five business figures in the Dnipro region at his peak. Nizhnikau said Yermolaiev’s inclusion on Ukraine’s sanctions list may have been influenced partly by lobbying from business rivals rather than exclusively by the Crimea allegations.
Regional implications
The attack is the most serious security incident in Monaco in living memory and has exposed a structural vulnerability in the principality’s otherwise extensive surveillance network: the absence of border controls with France. The suspect in Monday’s bombing crossed into French territory on foot without interception in the minutes after the explosion.
Monaco’s judicial authorities said the appointment of three investigating judges gives the inquiry access to formal international judicial cooperation channels, a step that will streamline evidence-sharing and requests for provisional arrest of the suspect abroad. The Interpol Red Notice issued Thursday covers all 196 Interpol member countries.
Background
Monaco, with a population of roughly 38,000 people on less than two square kilometres of Mediterranean coastline, has one of the highest densities of CCTV cameras of any jurisdiction in the world. It is surrounded on land entirely by France and has no active customs or immigration checkpoints along its land borders, which run through dense urban areas of the French Riviera. Targeted attacks against Ukrainian oligarchs — including bombings, shootings and poisonings — have occurred periodically in European cities since 2022, with the war in Ukraine creating both new motivations and new operational networks capable of carrying them out.
What happens next
Monaco’s prosecutor general’s office said it would hold a press conference on Friday, July 3, to provide further details on the investigation. The three newly appointed investigating judges will oversee both the domestic inquiry and the formal international cooperation requests activated by the Interpol Red Notice. Yermolaiev’s partner remains in hospital in Nice. No official statement on the SBU theory reported by Le Figaro has been issued by any Ukrainian government body, and investigators have not publicly named a motive for the attack.
