THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
It sounded like a ‘grenade exploding inside a volcano’ and it was right outside my window at 9pm on Monday night, June 29, while I was watching a Netflix rom-com. It was like a semi-truck had dropped from the sky onto the pavement. I listened and heard sirens and fire trucks nearby and many voices outside my terrace. My first response was to run outside but I decided not to investigate when I realized I was only wearing my bikini bottoms.
I put my shutter down and slept fitfully until I woke up at 4:30am to the news that the building across the street had been bombed in an assassination attempt on a Ukrainian billionaire living opposite me in Monaco. The explosive appears to have contained bolts and pellets.
The Ukrainian, Vadim Yermolaiev had business ties with Russia. His family were targeted and he, his wife and teenage son are all in the hospital, one rumored to have lost their legs. The suspect was caught on security cameras fleeing to Beausoleil, a French town bordering Monaco. He is still at large. All of this, in the so called, ‘safest place in the world’.
After my husband passed away, I thought the safest place for me to reside as a new widow would be Monaco, a less than one square mile principality on the French Cote d’Azure. There are cameras and police looking at every resident and tourist, even in the elevators that take you to and from each of Monaco’s three levels. There was a raid on the Cartier store a few years back and the robbers didn’t make it 5 minutes after escaping the crime scene before they were apprehended. Some young people were snorting cocaine in a side street, only to have the police arrive and haul them off. It’s the most patrolled city/country in the world. I’m often on my way to the Monte Carlo Country Club, that is really on the border in France, when I see cars and motorcycles stopped for no apparent reason. Entering the tiny country is a virtual ‘Fort Knox.’
Walking my dog early the next morning, things were eerily quiet. I didn’t venture towards the cordoned-off bomb site but…s**t, what a thing to happen just a stone’s throw away from where I’m living.
Why then, did someone enter the building across the street from me and leave a backpack full of explosives in the lobby? It has me and everyone else in the country spooked. There are 38,000 residents, all here for tax and safety reasons. Now one of their own has been targeted for assassination with no thought of collateral damage. The Telegraph quoted this morning “Exiled tycoon felt safer in Monaco than Kyiv. It was a costly mistake!”
If it was Russia targeting the Ukrainian, they do have a history of assassination in other countries. It’s not unprecedented as the fatal radioactive poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in the Millennium Hotel in the middle of Grosvenor Square proved. Those murderers were Russian agents ‘probably’ sanctioned by Putin according to the findings in The Hague. It’s true, Monaco is full of Russians. The restaurant menus are in French, English and Russian, and more often than not you find yourself in the gym changing room or a store surrounded by Russian speakers. This has been true for a while.
At the moment the suspect is still at large and a manhunt is going on in southern France.
Monaco is supposed to protect you from all the nonsense going on in the rest of the world. The dream is now shattered. I’m heading for Miami next week.
