Explosion in Monaco reportedly wounds Ukrainian tycoon with ties to Russia

MONACO (AP) — An explosion at an apartment building entrance in Monaco reportedly wounded a Ukrainian tycoon with ties to Russia and two other people, the chief prosecutor in the exclusive Mediterranean country said Tuesday.

A search was underway for a suspect who fled on foot after the blast late Monday, Prosecutor Stéphane Thibault said, adding that the motive was unclear.

Media reports identified Ukrainian construction tycoon Vadym Yermolaiev as being among the injured. He has said he renounced his Ukrainian citizenship nearly a decade ago, and he was targeted by Ukrainian sanctions in 2023 for ties to Russia. A woman and a child were also hurt.

“It appears that the family was specifically targeted,” said Christophe Mirmand, the minister of state for Monaco. He said the suspect “had walked around the area several times while waiting for the victims,” according to surveillance footage.

It was not clear why the family was targeted or by whom.

Russia has a long history of targeting its enemies abroad, and Western intelligence officials have recently said that a campaign of targeted killings has ramped up since President Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Ukraine is also believed to have carried out attacks and targeted killings of Russian figures in the course of the war, although those attacks have largely been confined to Ukrainian or Russian territory.

The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said its embassy in France, which is also responsible for Monaco, was in touch with local authorities. Ukrainian diplomats were at the scene providing assistance, it said.

Attack shocks glamorous Monaco

The attack shocked the country on the Mediterranean coast, one of the world’s smallest sovereign states known for its high concentration of wealthy residents. Monaco’s Prince Albert II described it as “an odious act” and said all public services were mobilized to ensure security.

Monaco police opened an attempted murder investigation, but they did not describe it as a terrorism investigation, Thibault told reporters.

The family members are “regular” residents of Monaco, and authorities did not yet know whether they had been threatened in the past, Mirmand said.

The blast occurred around 9 p.m. Monday at the entrance of a residence near the French border.

Silvano Ippolito, who lives across from the building where the explosion happened, described hearing it and seeing a little boy on the ground being attended to by other people. He then called his wife, a doctor, who provided first aid to the badly wounded woman.

“She intervened very quickly, before the emergency services arrived, to apply tourniquets and perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, as the woman was losing consciousness,” Ippolito said.

A man came out of the building covered in blood and staggering. As he tried to go down the stairs, the staircase collapsed, and he fell on Ippolito’s wife and a firefighter, he said.

The woman’s injuries were “a real disaster,” Ippolito said. “I’m telling you, she had no foot.”

The woman was in life-threatening condition, Thibault said. He did not provide the identities of the people who were hurt.

The woman was being treated at a hospital in Nice, Mirmand told French news broadcaster LCI. Her partner and the 13-year-old child suffered less severe injuries but were still hospitalized Tuesday, he added.

The suspect got away via steps to a small street to the neighboring French town of Beausoleil, according to surveillance footage.

In a picture captured by surveillance cameras and published by French media, the suspect could be seen in a street wearing a black jacket, light-colored pants, white shoes and a black bucket hat that partly concealed his face.

The three people were “apparently returning home peacefully,” Mirmand said, citing surveillance footage. “They were caught in the explosion as they crossed the threshold of their apartment building.”

Ukrainian tycoon is a well-known real estate developer

Yermolaiev, a Ukrainian-born businessman originally from the city of Dnipro, built his fortune through the Alef Group, a diversified business that includes commercial real estate, manufacturing and agriculture. He became one of the country’s best-known property developers, leading projects that reshaped parts of Dnipro’s city center. He has regularly appeared in rankings of Ukraine’s wealthiest entrepreneurs.

In an interview with Forbes Ukraine, Yermolaiev said he renounced his Ukrainian citizenship and became a Cypriot citizen in 2017.

In December 2023, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy imposed sanctions on Yermolaiev as part of a broader package targeting individuals and companies Kyiv said had business links to Russia or Russian-occupied territories.

The Cyprus Registrar of Companies lists a man called Vadym Iermolaiev as the director of Vespano Ltd., a company in the Cypriot city of Limassol first registered in January 2019. Cyprus’ Interior Ministry told The Associated Press it could not provide information about the man’s citizenship status due to confidentiality rules.

A coastal playground for the rich and famous, Monaco is renowned as much for its tax-friendly incentives and Formula 1 Grand Prix as its glamorous royal family. The small principality is widely regarded as one of the safest places in the world, in part because of its network of thousands of surveillance cameras covering most public spaces.

Monaco’s population of 38,000 is multinational, with only a fifth of the population actually citizens of the principality.

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Associated Press journalists Illia Novikov in Kyiv, Ukraine; Menelaos Hadjicostis in Nicosia, Cyprus; and Barry Hatton in Lisbon, Portugal, contributed to this report.

Philippe Magoni, Sylvie Corbet And Oleg Cetinic, The Associated Press