Explosion kills Russian serviceman in occupied Sevastopol. Unconfirmed reports identify the victim as a former Ukrainian submarine commander who defected to Russia.

A bomb explosion killed a Russian serviceman in occupied Sevastopol. The regional branch of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) announced that it had detained a Russian citizen born in 1994 on suspicion of carrying out the attack, allegedly acting on the orders of Ukrainian intelligence services. The FSB did not name either the serviceman killed or the person detained.

The explosive device was planted in a trash bin next to a bench on Stoletovsky Prospekt. That’s according to the Telegram channels Baza and Mash, both close to Russian security officials. Witnesses said the man was climbing some stairs with a friend when the blast occurred, and there’s been no word on his friend’s condition. The Telegram channel “ChP / Krym” reported that a woman who had been following the man detonated the bomb and that local residents detained her, though the channel later deleted that report. A law enforcement source told the Russian business news outlet RBC that the woman set off a bomb hidden inside a backpack.

The man killed was Robert Shageev, an officer in the Russian Navy, according to the anonymous Russian Telegram channel VChK-OGPU and pro-Russian blogger Anatoly Shariy, though that has not been officially confirmed. The Telegram channel 112, which is close to security officials, reported that a captain first rank was killed in the blast but did not give his name.

Shageev, a Crimea native, is the former commander of the Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine’s only submarine. He surrendered the submarine to Russian forces in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, and went on to command the Russian Black Sea Fleet submarine Veliky Novgorod, before becoming deputy commander of the fleet’s 4th Separate Submarine Brigade. Ukraine has opened a treason case against him, and its State Bureau of Investigation has claimed that Shageev is taking part in the full-scale war. The Ukrainian project Evocation has reported that submarines under his command have carried out massive missile strikes on Ukraine.

Mash claims that Margarita Reut (or Reutt), a 32-year-old Sochi resident, was detained on suspicion of carrying out the attack. That has not been officially confirmed. A court in Krasnodar Krai fined her 30,000 rubles in August 2025 under an administrative statute on “discrediting” the military (Article 20.3.3, Part 1, of Russia’s Administrative Offenses Code) and sentenced her to two days of administrative detention for failing to comply with a lawful police order. Investigators say Reut was riding a train from Samara to Adler on the evening of July 18 when she shouted “That’s what you deserve, Russians” during a drone attack on the Likhaya station in the Rostov region.

The Telegram channel also reported that Reut had allegedly planned to fly abroad after the attack and had already bought a plane ticket out of Sochi. She reportedly confessed and said she had been paid in cryptocurrency to kill the officer. The Russian Telegram news channel “Ostorozhno Novosti” reports that she had volunteered for cleanup efforts, including removing fuel oil from beaches in Anapa, and also ran her own business.

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