Today's briefing:
A parcel bomb in Monaco wounded a sanctioned Ukrainian tycoon's wife and family.
Federal prosecutors charged an eighth suspect in the White House drone and sniper plot.
A Russian jet buzzed a UK carrier days before London sanctioned Novichok-linked entities.
Welcome to your weekly briefing.
A principal tells us their address is the safest in the world. Monaco, a gated estate, a doorman who knows Ju-jitsu. The instinct is to relax, because someone seems to have done the hard work for us.
No one has. A prestige address is a reputation, and reputation doesn't check the locks. So we check them, every time, whatever the doorman says. Minutes of work. It is the difference between keeping the contract and explaining, afterward, why the safest address in the world isn’t anymore.
This week On the Circuit, we're looking at what happens when reputation gets mistaken for a security plan.
Don’t have time to read? Watch 👇
TOP STORY
Nobody Moved It
A backpack sat unattended at the entrance of a residential building on Rue Révérend Père Louis Frolla in Monaco, on the evening of June 29. Nobody moved it. Inside was an improvised device packed with bolts and metal fragments. When it detonated around 9 p.m., Ukrainian construction magnate Vadym Iermolaiev was walking out with his wife and their 13-year-old child. His wife lost both legs. Iermolaiev suffered burns and shrapnel wounds.
Interpol has named the suspect as Anastasiia Berezovska, 39, a Ukrainian-born woman initially mistaken for a man on camera. She crossed the nearby border into France on foot and escaped in a rental car. A red notice has been issued. She remains at large.
Iermolaiev is not a bystander who wandered into someone else's fight. He renounced his Ukrainian citizenship years ago and holds a Cypriot passport. Kyiv sanctioned him in 2023 over alleged business ties to Russia. Someone decided the entrance to his building was the moment to act. It happened on a quiet street, inside one of the most closely watched square miles on the planet.
Monaco runs on a reputation for safety, built on one of the highest concentrations of police officers and surveillance anywhere in the world. None of that stopped a bag from sitting unattended at a residential entrance long enough to detonate.
Our Take
We don't know whether this was a lapse in routine security or an attack that would have succeeded regardless of the precautions in place. What we do know is that Monaco's reputation did not stop the bomb from reaching its target. That is reason enough to stop treating locations, previously considered impenatrable, as safe-by-default and assess it ourselves. We owe it to our clients and colleagues to apply the same level of scrutiny to our checks wherever we’re operating in the world.
READER POLL
What would make you turn down a principal, no matter the fee?
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MEANWHILE
The Eighth Arrest
Federal prosecutors charged Alexander Iniguez Mercado, 20, of Chicago, on June 26. He is accused of obstruction of justice for deleting Signal messages tied to the disrupted plot against the June 14 UFC Freedom 250 event on the White House South Lawn. Mercado had administered a Signal group used to plan the attack, and is accused of uninstalling the app after an FBI agent contacted him directly.
Court documents describe a four-tier structure built by alleged cell leader Abraham Hermosillo Alvarez: direct combatants, drone operators and drivers, logistics, and financiers. Investigators say the plan called for drone-delivered explosives to force a crowd evacuation into a spot covered by designated shooters. Eight people across multiple states have now been charged. One high-ranking member of the cell remains at large.
Whose Waters Are These?
A Russian Bear-F maritime patrol aircraft made repeated close, low passes near HMS Prince of Wales on July 2, during Operation Firecrest in the Norwegian Sea. The aircraft dropped sonobuoys near the carrier and ignored radio calls. Two Royal Navy F-35Bs then escorted it away. The UK Ministry of Defence called the maneuver unsafe and unprofessional.
Four days later, the UK sanctioned seven individuals and two research institutes, including GosNIIOKhT and GNIII VM. Both worked on the Novichok nerve agent used against Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in 2018 and the epibatidine toxin used against Alexei Navalny in 2024. Both attacks were tied to Russian state programs.
Together, the two events land in the same week: a close-quarters military intercept and a sanctions package tied to chemical weapons attacks from 2018 and 2024. Both fall under a broader pattern of Russian pressure on the UK, spanning territorial waters and diplomatic channels alike.
Sound even smarter:
The family's legal exposure runs on more than one track. Iermolaiev's son Artur was separately detained in Cyprus this year on an Interpol warrant issued by Estonia.
Monaco's police presence is extreme by design. The principality maintains roughly 515 officers for a resident population of about 35,000, the highest police-to-population ratio of any sovereign state on earth.
SNAPSHOTS
🇨🇴 Colombia. Abelardo de la Espriella won the June 21 runoff by a razor-thin 49.7 to 48.7 percent. Rival Ivan Cepeda conceded three days later. The margin leaves little room for error ahead of the August 7 inauguration.
🇹🇷 Turkey. Comedian Deniz Goktas was jailed pending trial after a viral stand-up set called President Erdogan a dictator and touched on religious themes. He was detained July 2 at Istanbul airport on his return from a trip abroad.
🇺🇦 Ukraine. Russian missiles and drones killed at least 12 in Kyiv on July 6. Days earlier, a separate strike killed 31, the deadliest attack on the capital this year. Ukraine's air force says every ballistic missile fired that night found its target, exposing a critical shortage of Patriot interceptors.
🇮🇷 Iran. Mojtaba Khamenei, named Supreme Leader in March, has not appeared in public since suffering severe injuries in the February 28 attack that killed his father. He was absent from the elder Khamenei's funeral this week, with officials citing security concerns.
EXTRA INSIGHT
CYBER RISK. CISA, the UK's NCSC, and three other Five Eyes agencies warned on June 22 that AI is accelerating cyber threats faster than most defensive planning accounts for, stating plainly that "the timeline is not years, it is months." The five agencies are urging boards to treat cyber risk as a governance issue, not an IT one: assess actual readiness against an AI-accelerated attack, prioritize foundational controls before adding new tools, and give CISOs the authority and budget to act without a lengthy sign-off chain. It follows a joint warning the same agencies issued in May cautioning against rushing autonomous "agentic" AI systems into production, which they said could compound existing vulnerabilities rather than fix them.
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A locations reputation as a safe venue isn't a security plan, and it never has been. What we can rely on is the work we do ourselves, at that entrance, on that day, for that principal. It takes an hour to check. It takes a lot longer to explain why we didn't.
See you next week.
– On The Circuit
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PREVIOUS POLL - RESULTS
Q: The stranger at the door says he's contractor here for scheduled maintenance. What's your protocol?
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ A. He's escorted to the general area and left to it (14%)
🟩🟩🟩⬜️⬜️⬜️ B. Someone calls the listed vendor to confirm first (43%)
🟩🟩🟩⬜️⬜️⬜️ C. A guard checks the work order and escorts him throughout (43%)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ D. Something else. Let us know → (0%)
Your Comments:
YB: “An escort only works if they actually check the paperwork against the vendor list and don’t just wave people through because they look the part.”
OPJ: “Should be both. Confirm with the vendor AND stay with him the whole time. Why choose?”
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