It was just after dawn in Sevastopol when a powerful explosion tore through a quiet square in a residential district of the Russian-occupied Crimean port city.
Hidden inside a rubbish bin, a bomb containing the equivalent of about ۵۰۰g of TNT detonated on ۱۳ August 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 ۳۲-year-old resident of Sochi, the Russian resort city about ۳۰۰ 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 ۲۰۱۴ 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 before joining Vitauct in the early ۲۰۲۰s, an alternative medicine company specialising in longevity.
“She was the most ordinary person,” said Gennadiy Garbuzov, the company’s founder, who struggled to reconcile the woman he knew with the allegations now facing her. “There was nothing to indicate she would do this. She must have fallen under someone’s influence.”
On the surface, her online life was similarly unremarkable. She posted frequently about health and animal rights and took to Telegram forums to discuss alternative medicine.
Reutt also travelled widely. Leaked records from travel databases seen by the Guardian and photographs posted online show frequent trips abroad, including to Turkey, Thailand and Sri Lanka, where she often shared photographs of herself in bikinis at beach resorts.
“Margarita just seemed to be living her life and had lots of plans for the future,” said another colleague at Vitauct.
“She was good-looking and popular,” the colleague added.
In October ۲۰۲۵, Reutt travelled to Minsk for her sister’s wedding. Photographs from the celebration show her smiling among relatives and catching the bridal bouquet. To one friend she painted an idyllic picture of her life in Sochi, traversing mountains, waterfalls and canyons. “You can explore endlessly here, everything is lush and green,” she wrote to the friend.
But beneath that outwardly happy life, another side of Reutt was becoming visible. She increasingly expressed concerns about environmental problems plaguing Sochi, and started to become involved in local volunteer initiatives, friends said.
After a large oil spill in the Black Sea in December ۲۰۲۴, when two Russian tankers were wrecked in a storm, Reutt travelled to Anapa to join volunteers cleaning mazut, a heavy fuel oil, from contaminated beaches.
Exactly when dissatisfaction with her surroundings hardened into something more political is difficult to establish. Friends described a growing estrangement from Russia that deepened after the country launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“The war came as a shock,” said one friend, who recalled Reutt becoming increasingly outspoken in public about the fighting in Ukraine. “I told her once to keep quiet, otherwise she would get us both into trouble,” the friend said.
By July ۲۰۲۵, her anti-war feelings had spilt into public view. While travelling on a Samara-Adler train, Reutt was fined under Russia’s sweeping law against “discrediting” the armed forces after reportedly shouting “Serves you right, Russians!” when news broke of a Ukrainian drone strike on a railway station in the Rostov region.
The following February, Reutt posted the results of a genetic test showing she was ۹۸% Russian, adding a hashtag declaring that she was “ashamed to be Russian”.
Yet to friends and acquaintances, Reutt appeared to carry on much as before. She picked up occasional jobs, appeared in video clips made by friends and continued to travel. As recently as March, photographs from a trip to Cuba showed her drinking from a coconut.
It was only in late spring, several people who knew her said, that her behaviour began to change in ways they struggled to understand at the time. “She became more withdrawn,” recalled one friend.
Around the same time, a group of friends began planning a trip together for the autumn. Reutt declined to join them without much explanation – an unusual response from someone friends said could be counted on to say yes to a new adventure.
Another friend remembered Reutt suddenly acquiring a second phone. “She bought this second phone in the spring. She explained that she needed it for work, but it didn’t really make sense to me at the time.”
“Margarita was hiding something,” the friend added. “I thought maybe she had a new boyfriend.”
By the summer, Reutt had begun spending more time in Crimea, the place where she would eventually be arrested. One acquaintance said she explained the trips to Crimea by saying she was scouting possible locations for video shoots, having recently begun appearing more frequently in music clips.
What she was actually doing in Crimea – and when, if at all, she came into contact with Ukrainian intelligence – remains unknown.
If Russia’s allegations that she was recruited by Ukraine are true, Reutt would join a growing group of Russian citizens accused of being enlisted by Ukrainian intelligence to carry out sabotage and assassinations deep behind the frontlines.
Such recruits offer obvious advantages: they can move around Russia more freely, and attract less scrutiny than Ukrainian operatives, and they can reach targets far from the frontline without putting trained agents at risk. Women have featured prominently in several of the most high-profile operations, potentially attracting even less suspicion.
For those close to Reutt, there is no easy explanation for how the woman they remember ended up accused of carrying out an assassination. But a friend of two decades recalled a stubborn determination to follow through on whatever she decided to do.
“If she had a plan in mind, she would do it,” the friend said. “Even if it was something like this.”
