A bomb in Sevastopol killed a Russian military commander. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing The Guardian.
On 13 August, a powerful explosion tore through a quiet square in a residential district of Sevastopol, a Russian-occupied Crimean port city. Hidden inside a rubbish bin, a bomb containing the equivalent of about 500g of TNT detonated as Robert Shageev, the deputy commander of a Russian Black Sea fleet submarine brigade, walked past in naval uniform. He was killed on the spot.
Within hours, investigators had a suspect. Police detained Margarita Reutt, a 32-year-old resident of Sochi, the Russian resort city about 300 miles across the Black Sea from Sevastopol. During a search, investigators said they had found a remote control they believed was used to detonate the bomb that killed Shageev, a former commander of Ukraine's only submarine who switched allegiance to Russia in 2014 when Moscow annexed Crimea.
According to the security service, she confessed to the attack and said that a handler linked to Ukrainian intelligence had promised her a large payment in cryptocurrency and documents that would allow her to leave Russia afterwards. The FSB also said Reutt showed no remorse.
Those assertions could not be independently verified, and Russian security agencies have previously publicised purported confessions from detainees before their cases have reached court. But several people previously accused by Russia of carrying out similar attacks against military figures were later found by reporters to have been involved in the operations Moscow had accused them of conducting.
What exactly drove Reutt to allegedly embark on such an audacious mission remains unclear. As with other cases involving accused Ukrainian intelligence operations, her trial is likely to take place behind closed doors, offering little opportunity for her to give her own account publicly.
But interviews with a dozen friends and acquaintances, combined with an examination of years of her social media activity, offer a portrait of a determined and adventurous woman whose attitude towards her country appears to have hardened gradually, with signs of a more striking change emerging in the months leading up to the attack.
"Rita believed that the country was going in the wrong direction," said a longtime friend, using the diminutive form of her name. "But I am still shocked she went so far," the friend added.
Russia quickly accused Reutt of carrying out the attack on the orders of Ukrainian intelligence. Kyiv has not commented on the bombing or Reutt's alleged role in it.
Since the start of the full-scale invasion, Ukraine's intelligence agencies have been linked to a string of assassinations and attempted killings of senior Russian military officers whom Kyiv has accused of involvement in the invasion. Ukrainian officials have occasionally acknowledged involvement in such operations, but more often have remained silent.
The attacks have involved an array of methods and recruits, from committed anti-Kremlin saboteurs to Russians promised large sums of money. In other cases, unsuspecting couriers and delivery workers have effectively been used as mules.
Usually, little is known about those accused of carrying out such attacks or how they prepared for them. Some have managed to escape, or were never publicly identified by Russian authorities, while others were killed carrying out their operations.
The swift capture and naming of Reutt, however, offers a rare opportunity to examine the journey of a Russian citizen accused of turning against her own country.
Reutt, born Margarita Yakovleva, grew up in Yaroslavl, a city north-east of Moscow, where she took the surname of the grandmother who largely raised her after her parents divorced. Friends recalled a largely unremarkable childhood, remembering her as warm and sociable, but also unusually drawn to adventure and risk.
"Margarita was fearless. She would climb trees, jump off cars, do things most boys were scared of," recalled one friend from her childhood.
That streak followed her to Novosibirsk, thousands of miles to the east, where she studied management and threw herself into university life. Reutt became a regular at a local parachuting club, with photographs showing her jumping from Soviet-era aircraft, often the only woman among groups of men in camouflage gear.
She also won prizes in amateur go-karting competitions and took up water polo, becoming goalkeeper for the university team and quickly distinguishing herself despite being new to the sport. "Margarita was so talented and never afraid of the ball," recalled her water polo coach at the time.
There was little then to suggest hostility towards the Kremlin. In Novosibirsk, Reutt became a well-liked member of a patriotic volunteer group that searched for the remains of Soviet soldiers killed during the second world war, part of a nationwide movement dedicated to recovering and reburying the war dead.
After graduating, Reutt moved south to Sochi, the Black Sea resort that became her home. She briefly tried her hand at running a travel agency.