A Ukrainian former military officer went on trial Wednesday at the Hamburg Higher Regional Court, accused of organizing the 2022 sabotage that destroyed Nord Stream gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea, in the first public hearing of evidence in a years-long German investigation.
The defendant, a 50-year-old identified under German privacy rules only as Serhii K., denies any involvement and is the only person on trial. The proceedings are expected to run into February. When the court admitted the charges in early September, it had set 16 hearing dates reaching to December 17.
Federal prosecutors say Serhii K. led a team of Ukrainian agents that included divers and an explosives expert, and that the group acted for unidentified Ukrainian state entities. They allege he entered Germany through Poland on a forged Ukrainian passport about three weeks before the attack, and that the group then chartered a sailing yacht in the northern port of Rostock under false identities. According to the charges, the team sailed to an area near the Danish island of Bornholm and attached military-grade explosives fitted with timers to the pipelines on the seabed.
The court said there is sufficient suspicion that he was a co-perpetrator of a war crime. German prosecutors argue that destroying infrastructure in this way, by attacking civilian objects, amounts to that crime. ATN has gathered that the indictment also covers causing an explosion and disrupting public utilities.
Read Also: Ukraine Nord Stream Suspect To Be Extradited To Germany
The attacks came months after Russia’s full-scale invasion, at a time when European countries were trying to wean themselves off Russian energy, and they destroyed three of the four pipelines of the link. The explosions happened on September 26, 2022. Swedish seismologists detected several blasts about 17 hours apart, and three of the four concrete-coated steel pipelines ruptured, releasing large plumes of methane into the atmosphere. Nord Stream 1 had supplied about half of Germany’s natural gas imports before the damage. Its twin, Nord Stream 2, was built but never opened, because Berlin canceled its approval shortly before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
Russia had already reduced or halted flows through Nord Stream 1 on several occasions in the months before the blasts, in response to European sanctions, and Moscow has denied blowing up its own pipelines. Russian officials said on Monday that they expect a just verdict that names the perpetrators and those who ordered the operation. Ukraine’s government denies involvement, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said his government knew nothing about any plan to blow up the pipelines.
Serhii K. was arrested in Italy in August 2025 while on holiday and was extradited to Germany that November, after Italy’s top court approved the handover. Federal prosecutors filed their indictment at the Hamburg court at the end of June 2026. In November 2025, Ukraine’s human rights commissioner wrote to an Italian court and acknowledged for the first time that the defendant was serving in Ukraine’s armed forces when the explosions occurred, according to Ukrainian press reports. German media have described him as having served in a special forces unit.
Read Also: Germany Suspends Controversial Russian Pipeline Project
A second suspect is waiting in Croatia. German prosecutors identify him as Vladimir Z., a trained scuba diver who they say was one of the divers who planted the explosives. He was arrested on August 19 in the coastal city of Pula under a European arrest warrant, and a Croatian court approved his handover to Germany last month. That ruling faced an appeal, and the final decision was pending as of late September, according to coverage at the time. A Croatian court has not been reported to have ruled on the appeal in the material ATN reviewed.
German broadcaster ARD has reported that investigators identified seven suspects in all, one of whom has since died fighting Russia. Only Serhii K. is on trial, and German authorities have not announced any other charges.
The case has put strain on relations between Berlin and Kyiv. Germany remains one of Ukraine’s strongest backers, and Russia and Ukraine continue to trade strikes in the war. German investigators believe the attack was ordered by a Ukrainian state agency with the aim of depriving Russia of energy revenue, according to the public account prosecutors have given.
The hearings are being held by the Hamburg court’s state protection senate and are expected to run until February of next year.
