Ukrainian Ex-Officer Goes on Trial in Germany Over Nord Stream Pipeline Blasts

A former Ukrainian army officer went on trial Wednesday in Hamburg, accused of organizing the September 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines, in the first courtroom test of who was behind one of the most consequential acts of industrial sabotage in postwar European history. The defendant, identified by German prosecutors under privacy rules as Serhii K. and named in earlier extradition proceedings in Italy as Serhii Kuznietsov, sat silently through roughly two hours of opening proceedings at the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court, listening to a German-to-Ukrainian interpretation through headphones. When the presiding judge asked whether he wished to address the court, his lawyers answered on his behalf: no.

Kuznietsov, 50, faces charges that include being a co-perpetrator in a war crime involving an attack on civilian objects, along with causing an explosion, destroying structures and disrupting public utilities. German federal prosecutors allege he led a small crew of professional divers, a skipper and an explosives specialist who placed timed charges on the Baltic Sea floor, rupturing three of the four pipeline strings that once carried Russian natural gas to Germany. Prosecutors brought the indictment in July, and the court's state-security senate agreed to hear the case in September, setting an initial run of 16 trial dates lasting into mid-December, with further sessions expected in January and February.

How Prosecutors Say the Pipelines Were Destroyed

According to the indictment, Kuznietsov entered Germany from Poland in early September 2022 using a forged Ukrainian passport, roughly three weeks before the attack. His alleged team chartered a sailing yacht from a German company in the port city of Rostock, using intermediaries and false identities to conceal who was actually hiring the vessel. The yacht sailed to waters near the Danish island of Bornholm, where prosecutors say the group lowered at least four military-grade explosive devices, each weighing between 14 and 27 kilograms, to depths of 70 to 80 meters and attached them to the pipelines with time fuses. The devices detonated on September 26, 2022, in blasts strong enough that Swedish seismologists registered them roughly 17 hours apart.

The damage was severe. Nord Stream 1 had carried close to half of Germany's imported natural gas before Moscow cut deliveries that August in retaliation for Western sanctions over the invasion of Ukraine. Nord Stream 2, a second, newly built pipeline, had never carried any gas at all: Berlin suspended its certification days before Russia's February 2022 invasion and the line sat idle. Prosecutors say the operation's goal was to permanently sever Russia's main westward gas export route and strip the Kremlin of the revenue it draws from energy sales to help finance the war. A second suspect, identified as Vladimir Z. and described by prosecutors as a trained diver, was arrested in Croatia in August on a European arrest warrant; he has applied for asylum there in an effort to resist extradition to Germany.

Three Investigations, One Prosecution Still Standing

Germany, Sweden and Denmark each opened criminal investigations within weeks of the blasts, since the explosions occurred in Danish and Swedish waters while the pipelines themselves terminate on German soil at Lubmin. Swedish investigators concluded early on that the damage amounted to "gross sabotage" involving a state actor, but Stockholm and Copenhagen later closed their inquiries, citing jurisdictional limits. That has left Germany's federal prosecutor as the only authority still pursuing a prosecution, a point Russian officials have seized on to question the fairness of the process; Moscow denies any role in blowing up pipelines it built and partly owned, and has suggested Western intelligence services bear responsibility instead.

The case sits awkwardly for Berlin. Joachim Weber, a senior fellow at the University of Bonn who studies the war's legal fallout, said the German government has largely avoided the subject even as it continues to back Kyiv with more than 100 billion euros in aid. "German governments have not really commented on this case," Weber said. The court itself has tried to keep the proceedings narrowly focused: in a separate ruling in late September, the same senate refused to admit Nord Stream AG and Nord Stream 2 AG as joint plaintiffs, finding that even repair costs in the "mid three-digit million" range per line did not rise to the kind of existential harm needed to justify their formal participation, and noting that a criminal trial is not the forum for sorting out wider blame or future compensation claims.

A Defense Built on Silence

Kuznietsov's lawyers used the opening session to ask the court to throw out the case entirely. Their central argument is that their client remains an active-duty Ukrainian officer bound by national-security secrecy rules that his own superiors have told him forbid any statement, even to his own defense team.

"Anyone who cannot speak out cannot be convicted," defense attorney Jes Meyer-Lohkamp told the court, adding that his client is confined roughly 23 hours a day under conditions he compared to solitary confinement.

A second defense lawyer, Nicola Canestrini, argued that the pipelines "were a weapon in the hand of the Russians" and said that if the court wants to weigh war crimes against civilian infrastructure, it ought to look instead at Russian conduct in places like Bucha and at the abduction of Ukrainian children. The defense also disputed the forensic basis of the case, noting that Kuznietsov's fingerprints were not found aboard the yacht and that no witness has placed him on it. Outside the courthouse, a small group of pro-Ukraine demonstrators gathered in support of the defendant; Ivan Kuritsyn, of the nonprofit group Vilni De Ua, said the group had come to show solidarity without questioning the court's authority to hear the case. Ukraine's government, including President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has repeatedly denied that the state ordered or sanctioned the pipeline attack, even as investigators have pointed to suggestions of involvement by Ukrainian security structures.

More than 100 journalists from countries including Britain, China, France, Russia and Ukraine were accredited to cover the opening session, a measure of how closely the case is being watched well beyond Germany. The court has not set a verdict date, and with dozens of further hearing days already scheduled into February, a resolution is not expected soon. For now, the trial's immediate significance may lie less in any verdict than in what becomes public along the way: the first detailed, court-tested account of how Europe's most scrutinized act of energy-infrastructure sabotage was allegedly carried out, and by whom.