Germany Tries a Ukrainian Officer Over the Nord Stream Blasts
Four years after three of the four pipelines ruptured in the Baltic, a 50-year-old identified in court only as Serhii K. has gone on trial in Hamburg. Prosecutors allege he led a team that hired a sailboat and placed military-grade explosives on the seabed. He denies all involvement.
The charge is unusual: prosecutors are proceeding under Germany’s code of crimes against international law, treating the sabotage as an attack by military means against civilian objects. They say he entered Germany on a forged passport three weeks beforehand and that the operation was carried out on the orders of Ukrainian state agencies. The trial is expected to run into February and is the first public airing of evidence after years of investigation. Kyiv is not conceding the account — Oleksandr Merezhko, who chairs the Ukrainian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, calls it “one of the versions” and argues the pipeline was “nothing but a tool used by Russia in order to get prepared for the war”. A German analyst notes successive chancellors have worked to keep the case out of politics and in the courts. The British interest is historical: Vladimir Putin blamed “the Anglo-Saxons” for the blasts, meaning Washington and London, and both denied it. Nord Stream 1 had supplied about half of Germany’s gas imports.