Nord

July 2 (UPI) — A Ukrainian national has been charged in Germany in connection with the 2022 bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines bringing natural gas 760 miles via the Baltic Sea from northwestern Russia to Lubmin in northeastern Germany.

Authorities allege the suspect, named only as Serhii K, led and coordinated an operation with seven others to sabotage the $17 billion gas projects on Sept. 26, 2022, according to reports in German media Wednesday. He is also charged with attacking and destroying civilian energy infrastructure and causing an explosion.

Prosecutors said he is the same individual who was detained by Italian authorities in August and extradited to Germany in November.

He denies all wrongdoing.

German prosecutors further allege he was a serving Ukrainian officer and that he and the others, who were also members of the Ukraine military, were “acting on behalf of state bodies in Ukraine” to deprive Moscow of energy revenues from the pipelines to fund its war against Ukraine.

The finger has variously been pointed at Ukraine, along with Britain and the United States, and even Russian itself, but the Federal Public Prosecutor General’s claim the attack was ordered by Kyiv was highly significant because Germany is one of Ukraine’s staunchest allies, providing military aid and political support.

Kyiv , which has always denied involvement, did not immediately respond to the accusation.

Three of the four pipelines were ruptured east of the Danish island of Bornholm in the attack. Nord Stream 1 was shut down at the time due to technical problems.

Nord Stream 2, a subsidiary of the Russian state-run energy giant Gazprom, was completed in September 2021 after being plagued problems including legal wrangles and U.S. sanctions targeting companies party to the project.

However, it never opened because Germany cancelled its certification process shortly before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 as it moved to wean itself from its reliance on Russian gas.

The project, which would have doubled Nord Stream’s gas capacity to 110 billion cubic meters annually — said by the company to be sufficient to supply to 26 million homes in Europe and critical to efforts to guarantee the European Union’s “security of supply of natural gas.”

Prosecutors allege a yacht was used in the sabotage of pipelines, with the suspect leading the operation.

German federal prosecutors ⁠have filed charges ⁠against a 50-year-old Ukrainian national over a series of explosions that destroyed two Nord Stream underwater gas pipelines linking Russia to Europe in 2022.

The federal prosecutor’s office declined to comment on the specifics of the indictment on Wednesday against the accused, who is identified only as Serhii K in court documents under German privacy rules.

Serhii K is accused of attacking civilian energy infrastructure, causing an explosion, and destroying structures, according to the German public broadcaster ARD.

The underwater explosions damaged both the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines so severely that no gas could be transported through them, knocking out the key routes for Russian gas ⁠to Europe for months after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

In a December 2025 detention filing by the Federal Court of Justice, prosecutors allege that Serhii K helped coordinate a team that used a sailing yacht, the Andromeda, to place explosive devices on the pipelines near Denmark’s ⁠Bornholm Island in September 2022.

According to those documents, Serhii K is suspected of acting as the on-board coordinator and team leader, not as a diver or bomb expert.

The Berlin law firm Menaker, which is representing the accused Ukrainian, has not provided any details on the indictment.

Federal prosecutors confirmed to the AFP news agency that Serhii K was the same suspect who was arrested in August 2025 in Italy and extradited to Germany the following November, and who was named at the time as Serhii Kuznietsov.

At the time of his arrest, German prosecutors said Kuznietsov had used forged identity documents to charter a yacht, which departed from the German city of Rostock to carry out the attacks.

Kuznietsov has denied being part of the sabotage operation. He said he was a member of the Ukrainian armed forces and in Ukraine at the time of the incident, a claim his defence team has said would give him “functional immunity” under international law.

Answering a question from Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine during a news conference in Dublin on Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said it was too soon to comment on the charges against Serhii K in detail.

“We have not officially received any details; at least I have not seen them”, Zelenskyy said. “It is too early to say yet,” he added.

Ukraine’s government has previously denied any involvement in the sabotage or knowledge of the plot to bomb the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines.