Nord Stream Sabotage Suspect Faces German War Crime Charge

By Karin Matussek

Oct 18, 2026 (Bloomberg) –A Ukrainian army officer suspected of being a protagonist in the sabotage of Nord Stream gas pipelines in 2022 stood trial in Hamburg accused of committing a war crime.

The man, identified as 50-year-old Serhii K., was chosen by Ukraine authorities to lead the operation, prosecutor Stefan Schmidt said on the first day of trial. Serhii K. was arrested in Italy a year ago and extradited to Germany.

“He had the mandate and authorization from the Ukraine government,” prosecutor Schmidt said. The crucial pipelines ferried gas from Russia through the Baltic Sea to Lubmin, a costal city in the North East of Germany. 

Serhii K. was an officer in the Ukrainian Army. After Russia invaded the country in February 2022, he and other military personnel, acting on behalf of Ukrainian government agencies, devised a plan to destroy the Nord Stream 1 and 2 natural gas pipelines, according to the indictment. The goal was to permanently halt gas deliveries via the pipelines and prevent Russia from using the revenue from gas trades to finance its war efforts.

To carry out the plan, Serhii K. allegedly lead a group of professional divers, a boat captain skipper and an explosives expert. In early September 2022, the crew entered a sailing yacht which had been rented in Rostock, Germany, using forged identification documents.

With the ship, the men transported explosives for military use to a location near the Danish island of Bornholm. In the weeks leading up to the attack Serhii K.’s group attached various explosive devices with time fuses to the pipelines. They detonated on September 26, 2022.

Serhii K.’s lawyers rejected the allegations. 

Nicola Canestrini, a defense lawyer for Serhii K., said Germany can’t try his client for a war crime because that wasn’t covered by the Italian extradition ruling granted only for a sabotage charges.   

No one was hurt or killed by the incident and Germany tragically mistakes who the real perpetrators are, Canestrini told the court.

“After Bucha, Mariupol, and the abducted Ukrainian children, he’s the first person the German authorities are trying as a war criminal—not a Russian, but an officer in the armed forces defending against a war of aggression,” he said.

Russia had used the pipeline as a military, financial and political weapon in the war, so defining it as a merely civilian object was wrong, he added. 

There was also no direct evidence, like finger prints or DNA, that proved Serhii K. was on the yacht, Canestrini said. The indirect evidence prosecutors are now citing was illegally transferred from Italy to Germany without proper judicial authorization.

Serhii K.’s lawyers asked the court to drop the case because his Ukrainian military superiors didn’t allow him speak about details of his service and disclosing them would be a crime under Ukrainian law. Since he can’t properly defend himself now, the trial must be discontinued, they argued.

Speculation had swirled about the origin of the attacks on the pipelines, installed to deliver natural gas from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea. The incident triggered a wave of accusations, with Russia blaming it on sabotage by the US, Ukraine and Poland, calling them “beneficiaries” of the blasts.

The Nord Stream 1 undersea link to Germany was the main route for Russian pipeline gas flows before the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, while the second pipeline was completed but never went operational. In 2021, the year before the war started, Nord Stream 1 delivered more than a third of Russia’s total gas exports to Europe.

(Updates with defense lawyer statements starting in the eighth paragraph.)

© 2026 Bloomberg L.P.

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