A Ukrainian diver has been hauled into court in Poland over claims that he took part in the devastating undersea bomb attack on the Nord Stream gas pipeline.
The man, identified only as Volodymyr Z, was arrested in Poland on Tuesday and has been remanded in custody for at least a week.
‘He is detained for seven days, and it is difficult to agree with this decision,’ his lawyer Tymoteusz Paprocki said.
No one has ever taken responsibility for explosions that severely damaged pipelines carrying gas from Russia to Europe in September 2022, marking a major escalation in the Ukraine conflict and ramping up an energy supply crisis on the continent.
The suspect, a trained diver, has been living in Poland for three-and-a-half years and has a valid Polish residence card.
He is said to have been part of a group of six people who hired a yacht in the German port of Rostock and sailed to a point in the Baltic Sea above the pipelines.
There they placed explosives on the gas pipes and detonated them, damaging three of the four conduits in the Nord Stream project, German prosecutors claim.
He was arrested on Tuesday in a suburb of Warsaw by Polish authorities executing a European arrest warrant issued by the German prosecutors.
If extradited he will be brought before an investigating judge at the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe, charged with unconstitutional sabotage and destruction of property.
Earlier this month, an Italian court ordered that another Ukrainian arrested over the sabotage, Serhii Kuznietsov, 49, should be extradited to Germany to face charges.
Nord Stream had long been controversial for allowing Russian gas to bypass eastern European transit routes and for leaving Germany overly reliant on cheap energy from Moscow.
After Russia launched its Ukraine invasion in February 2022, Western powers imposed sanctions on Moscow, which then switched off the gas flow in Nord Stream 1, while Nord Stream 2 never started operations.
The pipeline was sabotaged in September 2022 with underwater blasts and four gas leaks discovered off the Danish island of Bornholm, as gas spewed to the surface.
The blasts saw three of the four pipelines suffer major damage. The critical piece of energy infrastructure took 15 years to build.
Mystery has long surrounded the blasts with Ukraine and Russia both denying involvement.
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