HAMBURG / BERLIN, July 2 — Germany’s Federal Public Prosecutor on July 1 filed formal charges against a 49-year-old Ukrainian national identified as Serhii K., marking the first criminal indictment brought in the nearly four-year investigation into the September 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 natural-gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea.
The indictment was submitted to the district court in Hamburg, where the accused has been held in pre-trial custody since being extradited from Italy in November 2025. German privacy rules limit his public identification to his first name and surname initial. He is charged with causing an explosion, jointly sabotaging critical infrastructure and attacking civilian energy installations — categories that the prosecution has publicly framed as covered by war-crime provisions of international humanitarian law, on the ground that the pipelines are protected civilian objects. The trial is expected to open in the autumn at the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court in Hamburg.
According to the prosecution’s account, the suspect served as the coordinator of an operational cell that boarded a chartered Bavaria Cruiser 50 sailing yacht named “Andromeda,” rented under false identity documents. Divers on the team allegedly descended to the Baltic seabed near Denmark’s Bornholm Island and planted explosive devices on the pipelines. The charges detonated on September 26, 2022, rupturing three of the four undersea lines linking Russia and Germany and triggering one of the largest single methane releases ever recorded.
Investigators say residue of the military-grade explosives HMX and RDX was recovered from the yacht, and that mobile-phone data seized after the suspect’s August 2025 arrest in the Italian coastal town of Rimini yielded further material. German security officials have said the defendant made statements over monitored phone calls to relatives and acquaintances during his months in Italian custody that prosecutors regard as self-incriminating. His attorney has said the defendant denies any role in the operation and expects an acquittal at trial.
The prosecution has identified additional Ukrainian nationals — including divers, a captain and an explosives specialist — as members of the same operational team and is pursuing them under German arrest warrants. One is reported to have died in the ongoing war in Ukraine. A separate suspect, a diving instructor, was detained in Poland in late 2024 on a European Arrest Warrant, but Warsaw declined the German extradition request and released him.
In a court filing published in December 2025, Germany’s Federal Court of Justice said the operation was “highly likely” directed by a foreign state intelligence service. The chief federal prosecutor has publicly indicated that investigators reached the same working assessment while stressing that the current indictment addresses the alleged conduct of one individual and does not attribute the attack to any state as a party. Denmark and Sweden concluded their national investigations in February 2024 without publicly naming perpetrators; the German probe has continued.
Speaking in Dublin on the same day at the launch ceremony of Ireland’s presidency of the Council of the European Union, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said his government had not yet officially received the full case file from Berlin and would issue a formal position after reviewing the material. Kyiv has consistently rejected any state involvement in the pipeline attack. Russia’s Foreign Ministry, which has previously described the blasts as an act of international terrorism, has repeatedly questioned whether such a complex underwater operation could have been carried out without the support of a state actor and has called for Western intelligence involvement to be examined.
The Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines were designed to move Russian natural gas to Germany and onward to European markets. Nord Stream 1 had already been shut for maintenance by the time of the blasts; Nord Stream 2 had never entered commercial service. Three of the four parallel lines were severely damaged and have remained out of operation since.
