Germany puts Ukrainian on trial accused of blowing up Nord Stream pipelines
Four years after the attacks, Serhii K will appear in court accused of a plot to destroy Russia's gas pipelines to Germany.
Germany puts Ukrainian on trial over Nord Stream pipeline blasts
Serhii K was extradited to Germany from Italy late last year
Four years after one of the most dramatic acts of sabotage in modern European history, a Ukrainian man is due to go on trial in Hamburg on Wednesday, accused of blowing up Russia’s Nord Stream gas pipelines to Germany.
Serhii K, as German prosecutors identify him, is accused of conspiring with other Ukrainian military personnel to destroy the pipelines and prevent Russia from funding its war through gas revenues.
The case is highly sensitive in Germany, which has been seen as one of Ukraine’s closest allies since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, seven months before the attacks.
Serhii K, extradited to Germany last year, will be the first suspect to face trial over the blasts.
He denies the allegations, as does a second suspect who is resisting extradition from Croatia.
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 pointed toward Moscow, though no blame was directly assigned.
Russia had already cut off gas supplies to Germany through Nord Stream 1 weeks before the attack, while Nord Stream 2 had never been activated. Berlin had frozen the multi-billion-dollar project shortly before the invasion, and there were reports of suspicious Russian naval activity before the blasts.
As investigators from Sweden, Denmark and Germany worked to determine who carried out the attack, Russia’s Vladimir Putin accused the US and its UK allies, blaming “the Anglo-Saxons” — an accusation they denied.
Eventually, after Denmark and Sweden closed their investigations, German prosecutors turned their attention to a group of deep-sea divers who had rented a yacht called the Andromeda in the northern German port of Rostock.
They later said that “traces of subsea explosives were found in the samples taken from the boat”.
Three of the four Nord Stream pipelines were damaged by explosions in September 2022
Despite the strain on relations with Kyiv, German prosecutors continued with the case, and in January 2025 the German federal court of justice ruled that it fell within German territorial jurisdiction, and that prosecutors had a duty to act because it involved “undermining [Germany’s] internal security”.
Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky has consistently maintained that Ukraine had “nothing to do with [the Nord Stream blasts]”, although German prosecutors allege in their indictment that the saboteurs devised the plot “acting by order of Ukrainian state agencies”.
They say the case falls under Germany’s code of crimes against international law as “a war crime” and “an attack by military means against civilian objects”.
The case has exposed differing views about the trial in Kyiv and Berlin.
Oleksandr Merezhko, who chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Ukrainian parliament, says the blasts happened during wartime with Russia and that “Nord Stream 2 was nothing but a tool used by Russia in order to get prepared for the war”.
He told the BBC that there was no confirmation of the German version: “It’s one of the versions.”
By contrast, Stefan Meister of the German Council on Foreign Relations says successive chancellors in Berlin have tried hard to strip the politics from the case.
“They tried to make not a big story out of it, not to give it too much attention, to give it to the institutions, to the judiciary that they will deal with it. This is not a political case. So they tried to depoliticise it,” he said.
In August 2025, Serhii K was arrested after checking into a hotel near the Italian Adriatic resort of Rimini, by police acting on a European arrest warrant issued by federal prosecutors in Germany.
After several weeks of court battles over 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, and that he led a group of professional divers, a boat captain and an explosives expert.
While his legal battle was unfolding in Italy, another Ukrainian man, Volodymyr Zhuravlov, successfully challenged Germany’s extradition request in a Polish court.
In a ruling very different from Italy’s Supreme Court, the Polish judge ordered Zhuravlov’s release in October 2025, saying the attack on the pipelines was not unlawful and that if Ukraine had organised an armed mission it was “justified, rational and just”.
Although he was released 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.
Last month, Croatia approved his extradition, although it is not clear when that will happen, or whether his case could become part of the Hamburg trial.
Despite the difficult nature of the case for Kyiv and Berlin, Ukrainian MP Oleksandr Merezhko does not think it will damage relations, saying “it’s in the best national interests of Germany to continue to support us”.