A 50-year-old Ukrainian former military officer went on trial on Wednesday at the Hamburg Higher Regional Court, accused of leading the team that blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea in 2022. Identified under German privacy rules only as Serhii K., he denies any involvement and is the only person in the dock. Hearings are scheduled to run until at least February.
Federal prosecutors say K., then an officer in the Ukrainian army, planned the operation with other military personnel on behalf of unnamed Ukrainian state entities. They allege he entered Germany via Poland on a forged Ukrainian passport and that his group of divers, a skipper and an explosives expert chartered a 15-metre sailing yacht, the Andromeda, in Rostock. According to the indictment, they planted six explosive devices with timers at depths of more than 70 metres near the Danish island of Bornholm. The charges include a war crime of attacking civilian objects, causing an explosion, destroying structures and disrupting public services, carrying a maximum of 15 years in prison.
On 26 September 2022, Swedish seismologists recorded blasts some 17 hours apart, and three of the four pipelines were ruptured. Nord Stream 1 had supplied about half of Germany's gas imports; Nord Stream 2 was completed but never opened after Berlin withdrew approval before Russia invaded Ukraine. Russia denies sabotaging its own pipelines, and Ukraine's government denies involvement. Moscow has said it expects a verdict naming those who carried out and ordered the attack.
K. was arrested in August 2025 while on holiday in Rimini, Italy, and extradited that November. Investigators say they found sea charts and pipeline details on his phone, and that wiretapped calls to his wife stressed his role as a soldier. Much of the rest, including a speeding photo and traces of explosives on the yacht, is circumstantial. A second suspect, diver Volodymyr Z., was arrested in Croatia, which has approved his handover; Poland had earlier declined to extradite him.
The case raises hard legal questions. His lawyers dispute German jurisdiction, arguing the act was probably state-directed and cannot be pinned on an individual. The pipelines lie in Danish and Swedish economic zones, and both countries dropped their inquiries, but Germany's Federal Court of Justice held that the damage took effect on German territory. It also said K. is unlikely to enjoy combatant immunity and treated the pipelines as civilian objects. International law scholar Kai Ambos argues that the economic benefit Russia drew from the pipelines does not make them military targets. Others have noted that the question remains contested.
The trial is politically awkward for Berlin, one of Kyiv's strongest backers, which agreed a strategic partnership with Ukraine only a week earlier. Many Ukrainians find it hard to understand why a bloodless attack on a Russian-linked asset is prosecuted, and a Ukrainian group in Hamburg planned a protest outside the court. Reports cited in the sources suggest the operation was approved at senior military level, while President Zelensky was reportedly unaware; prosecutors say there are sufficient grounds to suspect state orders, though the evidence has not been made public.