Germany puts Ukrainian on trial accused of blowing up Nord Stream pipelines

ByPaul Kirby, Europe digital editor and Jessica Parker, Berlin correspondent.

Key points

• Nevertheless, Stefan Meister, of the German Council on Foreign Relations, states successive chancellors in Berlin have done their best to remove the politics from the case.
• While his legal fight was going on in Italy, another Ukrainian man called Volodymyr Zhuravlov successfully challenged Germany's extradition bid in a Polish court.
• Russia had already shut off the flow of gas to Germany in Nord Stream 1 weeks before the attack, and Nord Stream 2 had never been turned on.
• Nord Stream trial: How German police followed the evidence – to Ukraine.
• The case has highlighted differences of opinion on the trial in Kyiv and Berlin.

Four years after one of the most dramatic acts of sabotage in modern European history, a Ukrainian man goes on trial in Hamburg on Wednesday accused of blowing up Russia's Nord Stream gas pipelines to Germany.

As he is identified by German prosecutors, is accused of plotting with other Ukrainian military personnel to destroy the pipelines and stop Russia financing its war with gas revenue, serhii K.

For context, the case is highly sensitive in Germany, seen as one of Ukraine's closest allies since Russia introduced its full-scale invasion in February 2022, seven months before the attacks took place.

Serhii K, extradited to Germany last year, will become the first suspect to go on trial for the blasts.

As does a second suspect who is fighting extradition from Croatia, he denies the charges.

In the months after explosives destroyed three of the four gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea off the island of Bornholm on 26 September 2022, Western suspicion looked towards Moscow without directly apportioning blame.

Russia had already shut off the flow of gas to Germany in Nord Stream 1 weeks before the attack, and Nord Stream 2 had never been turned on. Berlin had frozen the multi-billion dollar project shortly before the invasion and there were reports of suspicious Russian naval movements before the blasts.

As investigators from Sweden, Denmark and Germany tried to find out who carried out the attack, Russia's Vladimir Putin accused the US and its UK allies, blaming "the Anglo-Saxons" – which they denied.

After Denmark and Sweden shut down their inquiries, German prosecutors focused on a group of deep-sea divers who had rented a yacht called the Andromeda in the northern German port of Rostock, eventually.

They remarked afterwards that "traces of subsea explosives were found in the samples taken from the boat".

Despite the strain on relations with Kyiv, German prosecutors pressed ahead with the case, and in January 2025 the German federal court of justice ruled that it fell within German territorial jurisdiction, external and prosecutors had a responsibility to act as it involved "undermining internal security".

Although in their indictment German prosecutors allege the saboteurs conceived the plot "acting by order of Ukrainian state agencies", ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky has always maintained that Ukraine had "nothing to do with ".

They say the case falls under Germany's code of crimes against international law as a war crime" as an attack by military means against civilian objects".

Notably, the case has highlighted differences of opinion on the trial in Kyiv and Berlin.

Oleksandr Merezhko, who chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Ukrainian parliament, points out that the blasts took place during a time of war with Russia and "Nord Stream 2 was nothing but a tool used by Russia in order to get prepared for the war".

He informed the BBC they had no confirmation of the German account: "It's one of the versions."

"They tried to create not a sizeable story out of it, not to offer it too much attention, to provide it to the institutions, to the judiciary that they will accord with it. This is not a political case. So they tried to depoliticise it, " he explained.

In August 2025, Serhii K was arrested after checking into a hotel near the Italian Adriatic resort of Rimini, by police acting under a European arrest warrant issued by federal prosecutors in Germany.

After a number of weeks of court battles fighting extradition, Serhii K – identified in court documents as Serhii Kuznetsov – was transferred to Germany late last year.

German prosecutors allege that in 2022 he was a serving officer in the Ukrainian army, external, and he had led a group of professional divers, a boat captain and an explosives expert.

In a ruling particularly different from Italy's Supreme Court, the Polish judge ordered Zhuravlov's release in October 2025, stating that the attack on the pipelines was not unlawful, and if Ukraine had organised an armed mission it was "justified, rational and just".

Although he was published by the court in Warsaw, he was arrested last August in Croatia on suspicion of being a suspect who "participated in the dives necessary" for the sabotage.

Although it is not clear when that will happen, and if his case could become part of the Hamburg trial, last month, Croatia approved his extradition.

Despite the tough nature of the case for Kyiv and Berlin, Ukrainian MP Oleksandr Merezhko does not believe it will spoil relations as "it's in the best national interests of Germany to continue to support us".

For now, germany puts Ukrainian on trial accused of blowing up Nord Stream pipelines remains the part of the story worth watching, and further updates are likely as more details are confirmed.