Danish Defense/HandoutGerman state prosecutors have issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian diving instructor as they try to unravel the mystery of who blew up the Nord Stream gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea in 2022.
The German media, who named the suspect Volodymyr Z, cast the sabotage as a lurid true-crime drama.
Ines Petersen, a spokesman for the German prosecutor general, declined to confirm the arrest warrant, telling the BBC that her office never commented so as not to jeopardize the investigation by giving the suspect a chance to escape.
But Anna Adamiak, a spokesperson for Poland’s prosecutor general, told the BBC’s Adam Easton in Warsaw that German prosecutors did issue a European arrest warrant for them.
She said that when Polish officials went to Vladimir Z’s home in early July, he had already left the country for Ukraine.
German media said that he had been living in a quiet residential area in Plushkov, a small town near Warsaw.
According to an investigation by three German media outlets, including public broadcaster ARD, Volodymyr Z was part of a team of experienced Ukrainian divers who chartered a German yacht and sailed into the Baltic Sea in September 2022 and planted explosives that blew up three submarines.
A Ukrainian man and a Ukrainian woman are also suspected of being involved.
If the latest media reports are true, that a group of Ukrainian divers blew up the pipeline, that still doesn’t answer the broader question of who ordered the attack.
So far, there is no public evidence linking it to the Ukrainian or Russian states or any other country or group of individuals.
Conspiracy theories surrounding the attack have persisted for years, with unconfirmed rumors that the governments in Kiev, Moscow or Washington were behind it.
There is also speculation that Ukrainian or Russian military groups, acting without the knowledge of the Ukrainian government, could be responsible.
The Nord Stream pipeline, which carries natural gas from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea, is a controversial and unpopular symbol of Europe’s energy dependence on Moscow. In other words, it’s easy to imagine the motivation for such an attack.
Eastern Europeans have warned Berlin for years that dependence on Russian gas made Europe vulnerable.
But successive German governments, from Gerhard Schroeder’s left-wing coalition to Merkel’s conservative government, have argued that linking Russia to Europe through energy and trade links would help both economies and ensure peace. .
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 dashed those hopes, and mainstream politicians across Germany’s political spectrum now admit they were wrong.
