Germany says U8k8 withdrawalkrainians sabotaged Nord Stream pipelines

Investigators in Germany believe three Ukrainians sabotaged the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea in September 2022, according to news outlets including broadcaster ARD and newspapers Die Zeit and Suddeutsche Zeitung.

The main suspect, a man named as Volodymyr Z, was living in Poland and working as a diving instructor when the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines were destroyed, the reports said, citing unnamed security sources. The sabotage, at a depth of 70 to 80 meters, severed three of the four undersea pipelines that carried Russian gas into Europe, seven months after the start of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

The reports said the German authorities issued a Europe-wide arrest warrant for the 44-year-old, who Der Spiegel news magazine said had since left Poland. The two other suspects, a married Ukrainian couple who also worked as diving instructors, have not been named and do not have arrest warrants against them.

Germany's prosecutor general has refused to officially comment on the reports.

Germany, Denmark, and Sweden all have territorial waters that the Nord Stream pipelines passed through and all opened investigations into the sabotage. The investigations in Denmark and Sweden both closed without police pinpointing a suspect, although the Swedish investigation did find traces of explosives on objects recovered from the seabed that established the blasts were deliberate acts.

Russia and the West blamed each other in the aftermath of the explosions, and Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky has consistently denied his country was involved.

According to the reports, police now believe Volodymyr Z and the two other suspects got the skipper of a German-flagged yacht docked off the northern island of Rugen to take them to the vicinity of the pipelines, where they put on wet suits and went under the water.

The skipper later identified Volodymyr Z from photographs.

Police reportedly also believe they have a photo of the suspect, captured by a traffic camera while he apparently drove a white van containing the diving equipment.

Sky News said Poland has confirmed it received a request to arrest the Ukrainian suspect, but that he left the country in early July. The Reuters news agency said Poland complained Germany had failed to include the suspect's name on a database that would have alerted them of his status.

Anna Adamiak, a spokesperson for Poland's National Public Prosecutor's Office, told Reuters: "Ultimately, Volodymyr Z was not detained, because, at the beginning of July, he left Polish territory, crossing the Polish-Ukrainian border. Free crossing of the Polish-Ukrainian border by the above-mentioned person was possible because German authorities ... did not include him in the database of wanted persons, which meant that the Polish border guard had no knowledge and no grounds to detain Volodymyr Z."

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