Poland has arrested a Ukrainian targeted by a German warrant for his alleged involvement in the 2022 bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipelines, prosecutors said Tuesday.
AFP reports: In September 2022, seven months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a series of blasts under the Baltic Sea damaged three of the four Nord Stream pipelines designed to carry Russian gas to Europe.
While some in the West were quick to accuse Russia of sabotaging its own export route, German investigators say they have identified a Ukrainian cell of five men and one woman as the alleged perpetrators.
“Today, in the morning, a Ukrainian citizen, Volodymyr Z., was arrested in Pruszkow,” the spokesman for the Warsaw prosecutor’s office, Piotr Skiba, told reporters, identifying the suspect only by his first name and surname initial.
“He was wanted by German authorities under a European arrest warrant and is suspected of un-constitutional sabotage, destruction of property and destruction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline infrastructure,” Skiba said.
“According to German legislation, this act is punishable by a prison sentence of up to 15 years.”
The prosecutor said his office was expected to file a request on Wednesday for a Polish court to place the suspect in provisional detention for seven days while Germany files extradition papers.
The suspect’s lawyer, Tymoteusz Paprocki, confirmed the arrest.
“In the morning hours, my client was detained in one of the towns near Warsaw as a result of a European Arrest Warrant, which was issued by the German side and pertains to matters related to Nord Stream 2,” he told broadcaster TVN24.
Last year, German prosecutors issued a warrant for Volodymyr Z, but — Skiba said — before Poland could lay hands on him he left the country for Ukraine. It is not clear when he returned.
German prosecutors say Vladimir Z. is a trained diver and part of a group who placed explosive devices on the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines near the island of Bornholm in September 2022.
The accused allegedly travelled to the pipeline from the German port of Rostock aboard a sailing yacht, which they had rented with the help of forged identity documents via intermediaries.
If he is extradited, the accused will be brought before an investigating judge at the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe, the German prosecutors said.
The case is diplomatically awkward for Germany and Ukraine, as Berlin and its NATO allies have backed Kyiv with cash and weapons in its fight against Russia’s invasion.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said his government knew nothing about any plan to blow up the pipelines, but both Kyiv and Washington were at the time pushing Europe to reduce its dependence on Russian energy.
Paprocki argued that, given that Russia is at war with Ukraine and that the pipeline could be said to finance Moscow’s war effort, the defence could argue no Ukrainian should be held criminally responsible for destroying it.
Earlier this month an Italian court ordered that another Ukrainian arrested over the sabotage — 49-year-old Serhii Kuznietsov — should be extradited to Germany to face charges.
Nord Stream had long been controversial for allowing Russian gas to bypass eastern European transit routes and for leaving Germany overly reliant on cheap energy from Moscow.
After Russia launched its Ukraine invasion in February 2022, Western powers imposed sanctions on Moscow, which then switched off the gas flow in Nord Stream 1, while Nord Stream 2 never started operations.
Then, in September, seismic institutes reported underwater blasts and four gas leaks were discovered off the Danish island of Bornholm, as gas spewed to the surface. Two of the leaks were in Denmark’s exclusive economic zone and two in Sweden’s.