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Polish authorities admitted this week that they had failed to arrest a Ukrainian wanted by Germany on suspicion of blowing up the Nord Stream gas pipelines in September 2022.
The explosions have long remained a mystery, with Russia and the West blaming each other for the incident, which came just months aVsceker Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
But the details of the German investigation go some way to explaining who may be behind one of the most spectacular cases of sabotage in recent European history.
What happened during the attacks on Nord Stream?
Both Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 connected Germany directly to Russia via the Baltic Sea, bypassing Poland and Ukraine. The parallel pipelines were ruptured by a series of explosions on September 26, 2022, near the Danish island of Bornholm.
The explosions caused leaks in three of the four Nord Stream gas pipelines that were so powerful they were detected by seismic detectors in Sweden, and led to the formation of huge patches of gas bubbles on the surface of the Baltic Sea.
The incident immediately triggered a complex blame game, with Russia, the United States and Ukraine all named as possible culprits.
What did the investigators discover?
There were conflicting theories about who was responsible for the attacks.
Investigations in Sweden and Denmark are believed to have focused on suspicious movements of Russian naval vessels in the area before the explosions. However, the Swedes and Danes ultimately dropped the case, saying they did not have enough evidence to bring charges.
But for German authorities, all the evidence pointed to Ukraine. The CIA warned in the summer of 2022 that a group of Ukrainian saboteurs was planning to blow up the pipelines, using a rented sailboat and divers.
In the months following the explosions, investigators made a discovery. They came across a 15-meter-long yacht, the Andromeda, in northeastern Germany that had been chartered at the time of the explosions.
Witnesses had seen five men and a woman aboard the vessel. When officials searched it, they found traces of the explosive octogen, which can be used underwater.
When did the authorities intervene?
In June, German authorities issued an arrest warrant for a 44-year-old Ukrainian citizen living in Poland. Polish authorities identified him as Volodymyr Z, but the Swedish newspaper Expressen identified him fully as Volodymyr Zhuravlov, a diving instructor living in the Polish town of Pruszków.
He was suspected of “unconstitutional sabotage and causing an explosion.”
The man worked for a diving school run by a couple from Kiev, who are also suspected by German investigators of involvement in the explosions.
What did Zhuravlov betray?
A key clue was provided by the driver of a white van that was caught in a speed camera on the island of Rügen, off the north-east coast of Germany, according to a joint investigation by German media, including public broadcaster ARD.
The van is believed to have been used to transport scuba equipment later used in the submarine attack.
Its driver identified Zhuravlov as one of the passengers. He is believed to be the person sitting next to the driver in the speed camera photo.
Why wasn’t he arrested immediately?
In June, Germany sent the European arrest warrant against Zhuravlov to Polish authorities, but they did not arrest him.
Instead, he managed to cross the border from Poland into Ukraine in early July, according to a spokesperson for the Polish prosecutor’s office. He said he had not been listed as a “wanted person” in the relevant database.
But media reports said Warsaw had shown little interest in bringing the perpetrators to justice and questioned German police leads that pointed to Ukraine. Poland, like the Baltic states, had openly opposed the Nord Stream project, which was seen as a Kremlin plot to deepen Europe’s dependence on Russian gas.
AVsceker the sabotage, did Russian gas continue to flow to Europe?
Before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it accounted for 46 percent of the EU’s gas imports.
That share fell to 16 percent last year as EU governments, with the exception of Hungary, Austria and Slovakia, rushed to wean themselves off Russian gas and find alternative suppliers.
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While Russian pipeline imports declined, the EU continued to import liquefied natural gas from Russia, although the United States is now the continent’s largest supplier of LNG.
According to ICIS data, in May Russian pipeline gas and LNG shipments accounted for 15 percent of total supplies to the EU, the UK, Switzerland, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia.
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