In his revised version, he claimed that the two men had driven in his BMW to pick up Berezovska on the highway to Kyiv because she “needed to be hidden” in connection with “a criminal matter”.
He doesn’t clarify what that was.
On the way, Reut says Zhykovych produced a modified Makarov pistol from his rucksack and loaded it. When he protested, he says Zhykovych claimed it was just a precaution “in case she panics”.
After collecting Berezovska he says he was directed to drive towards the village of Yuriv where all three got out on a forest path.
There Reut says Zhykovych ordered him to shoot, saying: “It’s either her or us.”
In Reut’s telling, Zhykovych then killed Berezovska himself, with four shots, before the pair dug a grave and hid her body.
He says Zhykovych then threw the gun into a nearby lake along with her belongings.
But if Reut didn’t shoot her, why would he confess?
He now says he was threatened by Zhykovych. “He said, ‘If anything happens to me, your relatives are in danger’,” he claims.
Zhykovych’s lawyer rejected that new account.
Shaven-headed and fiddling incessantly with wooden rosary beads, Anatoliy Ivanov described his client as a low-level former SBU officer and dismissed the idea that a mere civilian could have ordered a serving HUR member to do anything, let alone carry out a murder.
He called Zhykovych a “patriot” who had fought in eastern Ukraine in 2014, like himself, and then “actively defended” the Kyiv region after 2022 when Russia launched its full-scale invasion.
“He does not want to be imprisoned. I understand,” Ivanov commented on Reut’s statement.
But he insisted that his own client “did not kill”.
The prosecutor says the two men acted “jointly and in a coordinated fashion” and both have been charged with premeditated murder.