A Ukrainian army officer suspected of being a protagonist in the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines in 2022 stood trial in Hamburg accused of committing a war crime, Bloomberg reported. The man, identified as 50 year old Serhii K., was chosen by Ukrainian authorities to lead the operation, prosecutor Stefan Schmidt said on the first day of trial. Serhii K. was arrested in Italy a year ago and extradited to Germany. “He had the mandate and authorization from the Ukraine government,” Schmidt said.
According to the indictment, Serhii K. was an officer in the Ukrainian Army, and after Russia invaded in February 2022 he and other military personnel, acting on behalf of Ukrainian government agencies, devised a plan to destroy the Nord Stream 1 and 2 natural gas pipelines, with the goal of permanently halting gas deliveries and preventing Russia from using gas revenue to finance its war. To carry out the plan, he allegedly led a group of professional divers, a boat captain and an explosives expert. In early September 2022 the crew entered a sailing yacht rented in Rostock, Germany, using forged identification documents, transported military explosives to a location near the Danish island of Bornholm, and attached explosive devices with time fuses to the pipelines in the weeks before they detonated on September 26, 2022. The pipelines ferried gas from Russia through the Baltic Sea to Lubmin in north east Germany.
His lawyers rejected the allegations. Defence lawyer Nicola Canestrini said Germany cannot try his client for a war crime because that was not covered by the Italian extradition ruling, which was granted only for sabotage charges, and argued that Russia had used the pipeline as a military, financial and political weapon, so defining it as a merely civilian object was wrong. He said there was no direct evidence, such as fingerprints or DNA, proving Serhii K. was on the yacht, that the indirect evidence was illegally transferred from Italy to Germany, and that the trial must be discontinued because his Ukrainian military superiors did not allow him to speak about details of his service. No one was hurt or killed in the incident.
Speculation has swirled about the origin of the attacks since 2022, with Russia blaming sabotage by the United States, Ukraine and Poland. Nord Stream 1 was the main route for Russian pipeline gas flows to Europe before the full scale invasion and delivered more than a third of Russia’s total gas exports to Europe in 2021, while the second pipeline was completed but never went into operation.