The Ukrainian defector who handed over to Russia Ukraine's only submarine in 2014 has been blown up by a prostitute in the naval town of Sevastopol using a bomb she hid in a rubbish bin.

The device went off on Stoletovsky Prospekt on August 13 as he climbed a flight of steps with a friend, planted in a bin beside a bench. Russia's FSB confirmed that a defence ministry serviceman had been killed and said it had detained a Russian woman born in 1994 who had been acting on the instructions of Ukrainian intelligence, Euronews reported. It named neither of them.

Russian Telegram channels did. They identified the dead man as Robert Shageev, 49, a Crimea native who commanded the Ukrainian navy's only submarine, the Zaporizhzhia, and surrendered it when Russia took the peninsula in 2014. He went on to serve as deputy commander of the Black Sea Fleet's 4th Separate Submarine Brigade and to command the Kalibr missile carrier Stary Oskol, the class of vessel that has spent three years firing at the country he came from. Kyiv had charged him with treason. His identity has still not been officially confirmed by either side, Meduza reported.

If the account is confirmed, it says something about the reach of the Ukrainian spy network and its web of assassins. Sevastopol is the most heavily policed city in occupied Ukraine, the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet and the place Russian counter-intelligence guards most closely - and somebody still got a bomb into a bin on the route of a submarine brigade officer and walked away from it.

The woman charged is Margarita Reut, 32, born in Yaroslavl and most recently living in Sochi. She was remanded on a charge of terrorism causing death, which carries up to 30 years, confessed, and answered “no” when asked whether she regretted the killing. She had been paid in cryptocurrency and meant to leave the country afterwards, according to Mash, a Russian channel with links to the security services.

Reut advertised on escort websites and worked as a biologist making floral-infused vaginal suppositories, the New York Post reported. She had already come to police attention in July 2025, when she was detained and fined for shouting “serves you right, Russians!” on a train from Samara to Adler after news broke of a Ukrainian drone strike on a railway station. Quite how a woman with that record was recruited, if she was, has not been explained.

A woman with no security background, a single task, a promise of money and a way out - and then the way out closes. In July the woman wanted over the Monaco bombing of a sanctioned Ukrainian tycoon was found shot dead near Kyiv.

Ukraine has said nothing at all, which is what it usually says.